me
since entering the room, he looked up at her with a lover's eyes.

Safe, with her arms round him, he was strong enough to face the worst.
"How good you are to me, dearest! And I don't deserve it. To-night, you
might just have sent me away again, when I came. For I was in a
disagreeable mood--and still am. But you won't give me up just yet for
all that, will you? However despondent I get about myself? For you are
all I have, Louise--in the whole world. Yes, I may as well confess it
to you, to-night was a failure--not a noisy, open one but all the same,
it's no use calling it anything else."

He had laid his head on her lap again, so did not see her face. While
he spoke, Louise looked at him, in a kind of unwilling surprise.
Instinctively, she ceased to pass her hands over his hair.

"Oh, no, Maurice," she then protested, but weakly, without conviction.

"Yes--failure," he repeated, and put more emphasis than before on the
word. "It's no good beating about the bush.--And do you realise what
it--what failure means for us, Louise?"

"Oh, no," she said again, vaguely trying to ward off what she foresaw
was coming. "And why talk about it to-night? You are tired. Things will
seem different in the morning. Shut your eyes again, and lie quite
still."

But, the ice once broken, he felt the need of speaking--of speaking out
relentlessly all that was in him. And, as he talked, he found it
impossible to keep still; he paced the room. He was very pale and very
voluble, and made a clean breast of everything that troubled him; not
so much, however, with the idea of confessing it to her, as of easing
his own mind. And now, again, he let her see into his real self, and,
unlike the previous occasion, it was here more than a glimpse that she
caught. He was distressingly frank with her. She heard now, for the
first time, of the foolish ambitions with which he had begun his
studies in Leipzig; heard of their gradual subsidence, and his humble
acceptance of his inferiority, as well as of his present fear that,
when his time came to an end, he would have nothing to show for it--and
under the influence of what had just happened, this fear grew more
vivid. It was one thing, he made clear to her, and unpleasant enough at
best, to have to find yourself to rights as a mediocrity, when you had
hoped with all your heart that you were something more. But what if,
having staked everything on it, you should discover that you had
mistaken your