don't seem to see you permanently given up
to forming the young."

"What--exactly--DO you seem to see me permanently given up to? You know
you warned me rather emphatically against the theatre." She threw
off the statement without impatience, as though they were discussing
together the fate of a third person in whom both were benevolently
interested. Darrow considered his reply. "If I did, it was because you
so emphatically refused to let me help you to a start."

She stopped short and faced him "And you think I may let you now?"

Darrow felt the blood in his cheek. He could not understand her
attitude--if indeed she had consciously taken one, and her changes of
tone did not merely reflect the involuntary alternations of her mood. It
humbled him to perceive once more how little he had to guide him in his
judgment of her. He said to himself: "If I'd ever cared a straw for
her I should know how to avoid hurting her now"--and his insensibility
struck him as no better than a vulgar obtuseness. But he had a fixed
purpose ahead and could only push on to it.

"I hope, at any rate, you'll listen to my reasons. There's been time,
on both sides, to think them over since----" He caught himself back
and hung helpless on the "since": whatever words he chose, he seemed to
stumble among reminders of their past.

She walked on beside him, her eyes on the ground. "Then I'm to
understand--definitely--that you DO renew your offer?" she asked

"With all my heart! If you'll only let me----"

She raised a hand, as though to check him. "It's extremely friendly of
you--I DO believe you mean it as a friend--but I don't quite understand
why, finding me, as you say, so well placed here, you should show more
anxiety about my future than at a time when I was actually, and rather
desperately, adrift."

"Oh, no, not more!"

"If you show any at all, it must, at any rate, be for different
reasons.--In fact, it can only be," she went on, with one of her
disconcerting flashes of astuteness, "for one of two reasons; either
because you feel you ought to help me, or because, for some reason, you
think you owe it to Mrs. Leath to let her know what you know of me."

Darrow stood still in the path. Behind him he heard Effie's call, and at
the child's voice he saw Sophy turn her head with the alertness of one
who is obscurely on the watch. The look was so fugitive that he could
not have said wherein it differed from her normal professional air of
h