e."

Lord Henry was silent and led the way back to the inn.

"You are doing what hundreds have done before you," he observed after a
while, "and always with disastrous results. You are condemning a man
unheard. Until this morning I was your friend, your most useful ally
here. You knew it, you felt it. I did everything in my power to bring
about a change in the balance of advantages, which was all in your
favour. You saw the proof of this. You drew strength from the very
change I created. You know you did; you cannot deny it. I worked with
zeal and with effect. God! if I worked with the same zeal for all my
patients I should be dead in a fortnight."

"Well?" she cried.

"Then you were told something by third parties,--something that seemed
to destroy in an instant all the careful work of my three days here. You
believed that there was only one interpretation of this thing, and that
was that my purpose all along had been so hazy and my nature so
capricious and irresponsible that I had suddenly resolved to reverse
the whole of the elaborate machinery which I had set in motion to
re-establish your health and spirits;--and what for?--in order, if you
please, to win the flattering smile of a mere child! Do you imagine that
even my love for your wonderful mother would ever have allowed me to
right-about-wheel all of a sudden in that ridiculous fashion? Come,
Cleopatra, be reasonable."

She averted her gaze, and her eyes began to well with tears.

"No, you have known the thing to happen before, and therefore you were
the more readily convinced that it had happened again. You had no faith
because your faith had been cruelly broken. But, believe me, although I
did this action this morning chiefly on your account and Leonetta's, and
partly also on account of a great friend of mine whom you do not yet
know, I swear I should never have undertaken it if I had dreamt for an
instant that it was going to cost you as much as a single tear."

The girl put her handkerchief to her eyes. "I'm afraid I don't
understand," she said. "It all seems so mysterious. I only know that,
one after another, you all seem to go the same way."

Lord Henry sighed. "Come," he said, offering her his arm again; "let me
make myself clear to you."

But she was too convulsed with sobs to move. The situation was certainly
difficult.

He waited, and looked for a while away from her.

"Besides," she cried at last, "you don't really know what I wanted to