eed more and more. I saw that I had perhaps done a fatal thing,
and I spent much time brooding and thinking. I felt an acute
distress, such as I had never felt in my life before--so much so
that I began even to avoid you, because I used to say to
myself--"She will go away some day--perhaps soon--and I must
accustom myself to it." And yet--'

He lifted the hand that shaded his eyes, and gave her a long
touching look.

'Yet I felt sometimes that you knew what was happening in me--and
were sorry for me. Then came the news of Desmond. Of those days
while he lay here--of the days since--I seem to know now hardly
anything in detail. One of the officers at the front said to me that
on the Somme he often lost all count of time, of the days of the
week, of the sequence of things. It seemed to be all one
present--one awful and torturing _now_. So it is with me. Desmond is
always here'--he pointed to the vacant space by the window--'and you
are always sitting by him. And I know that if you go away--and I am
left alone with my poor boy--though I shall never cease to hear the
things he said to me--the things he asked me to do--I shall have no
strength to do them. I cannot rise and walk--unless you help me.'

Elizabeth could hardly speak. She was in presence of that tremendous
thing in human experience--the emergence of a man's inmost self.
That the Squire could speak so--could feel so--that the man whose
pupil and bond-slave she had been in those early weeks should be
making this piteous claim upon her, throwing upon her the weight of
his whole future life, of his sorrow, of his reaction against
himself, overwhelmed her. It appealed to that instinctive, that
boundless tenderness which lies so deep in the true woman.

But her will seemed paralysed. She did not know how to act--she
could find no words that pleased her. The Squire saw it, and began
to speak again in the same low measured voice, as though he groped
his way along, from point to point. He sat with his eyes on the
floor, his hands loosely clasped before him.

'I don't, of course, dare to ask you to say--at once--if you will be
my wife. I dread to ask it--for I am tolerably certain that you
would still say no. But if only now you would say, "I will go on
with my work here--I will help a man who is weak where I am
strong--I will show him new points of view--give him new reasons for
living--"'

Elizabeth could only just check the sobs in her throat. The sad
humility