The words were very low; she was too truthful to conceal from him what
half dawned on herself--the possibility that, more in his presence and
under different circumstances, she might feel her heart go to him with a
warmer and a softer impulse than that of friendship. The heroism of his
life had moved her greatly.

His head dropped down again upon his arms.

"O God! It is possible, at least! I am blind--mad. Make my choice for
me! I know not what to do."

The tears that had gathered in her eyes fell slowly down over her
colorless cheeks; she looked at him with a pity that made her heart ache
with a sorrow only less than his own. The grief was for him chiefly; yet
something of it for herself. Some sense of present bitterness that
fell on her from his fate, some foreboding of future regret that would
inevitably and forever follow her when she left him to his loneliness
and his misery, smote on her with a weightier pang than any her caressed
and cloudless existence had encountered. Love was dimly before her as
the possibility he called it; remote, unrealized, still unacknowledged,
but possible under certain conditions, only known as such when it was
also impossible through circumstances.

He had suffered silently; endured strongly; fought greatly; these
were the only means through which any man could have ever reached her
sympathy, her respect, her tenderness. Yet, though a very noble and a
very generous woman, she was also a woman of the world. She knew that
it was not for her to say even thus much to a man who was in one sense
well-nigh a stranger, and who stood under the accusation of a crime
whose shadow he allowed to rest on him unmoved. She felt sick at
heart; she longed unutterably, with a warmer longing than had moved her
previously, to bid him, at all cost, lay bare his past, and throw off
the imputed shame that lay on him. Yet all the grand traditions of her
race forbade her to counsel the acceptance of an escape whose way led
through a forfeiture of honor.

"Choose for me, Venetia!" he muttered at last once more.

She rose with what was almost a gesture of despair, and thrust the gold
hair off her temples.

"Heaven help me, I cannot--I dare not! And--I am no longer capable of
being just!"

There was an accent almost of passion in her voice; she felt that so
greatly did she desire his deliverance, his justification, his return to
all which was his own--desired even his presence among them in her own
wo