n my position? It is not
because I care whether he lives or dies, or dies a natural death or is
stabbed in the back by a peasant. It is because I ought to care. I do
many things because I ought to care to do them, though the things and
their consequences are all one to me, now."

"It cannot last," said Francesca, sadly. "You will change as you grow
older."

"No. That is a thing you can never understand," he answered. "I am two
individuals. The one is what you see, a man more or less like other men,
growing older--a man who has a certain mortal, earthly memory of that
dead woman, when the real man is unconscious. But the real man is beyond
growing old, because he is beyond feeling anything. He is stationary,
outside of life. The world is a blank to him and always will be."

His voice grew more and more expressionless as he spoke. Francesca felt
that she could not pity him as she had pitied poor Lord Redin when she
had seen him going away alone. The man beside her was in earnest, and
was as far beyond woman's pity as he was beyond woman's love. Yet she no
longer felt repelled by him since she had understood what he had
suffered. Perhaps she herself, suffering still in her heart, wished that
she might be even as he was, beyond the possibility of pain, even though
beyond the hope of happiness. He wanted nothing, he asked for nothing,
and he was not afraid to be alone with his own soul, as she was
sometimes. The other man had asked for her friendship. It could mean
nothing to Paul Griggs. If love were nothing, what could friendship be?

Yet there was something lofty and grand about such loneliness as his.
She could not but feel that, now that she knew all. She thought of him
as she sat beside him in the monumental silence of the enormous
sepulchre, and she guessed of depths in his soul like the deepness of
the shadows above her and before her and around her.

"My suffering seems very small, compared with yours," she said softly,
almost to herself.

Somehow she knew that he would understand her, though perhaps her
knowledge was only hope.

"Why should you suffer at all?" he asked. "You have never done anything
wrong. Nothing, of all this, is your fault. It was all fatal, from the
first, and you cannot blame yourself for anything that has happened."

"I do," she answered, in a low voice. "Indeed I do."

"You are wrong. You are not to blame. Dalrymple was--Maria
Braccio--I--Gloria--we four. But you! What have you done