ealed to his better nature
as a thing of shame to do otherwise. She would marry him, he felt
sure of that. But marriage, with all its accompanying conventions
and indissoluble bonds--indissoluble, except through the loathsome
medium of the divorce court--was a condition of life that his whole
nature shrank from. He refused it utterly. This girl--this little
child--perhaps saw no other termination to their acquaintance than
that of marriage, and either this thought had become a brake upon
his desire, or he wished, in the honesty of his heart, to treat her
well; whatever it was, there was not that in his mind which made him
determine to be the one to teach her otherwise.

"Well, now sit down, don't stand about," he said kindly. "You can't
be really as strong as you think yet, and I've got something I want
to say to you. Take this chair, it's about the most comfortable there
is here, and I'll get that pillow for your back."

His voice was soft--gentle even--in the consideration that he showed.
To himself, he was striving to make amends; to her, he was that
tenderness which she knew lay beneath the iron crust of his harder
nature.

When she was seated, when he had placed the pillow at her back, he
took a well-burnt pipe--the well-burnt pipe that he had smoked before
under other circumstances than these--and filled it slowly from a
tobacco jar.

Sally watched all his movements patiently, until she could wait for
his words no longer.

"What have you to say?" she asked.

He lit the pipe before replying; drew it till the tobacco glowed like
a little smelting furnace in the bowl, and the smoke lifted in blue
clouds, then he rammed his finger on to the burning mass with cool
intent, as though the fire of it could not pain him.

From that apparently engrossing occupation, he looked up with a
sudden jerk of his head.

"You mustn't come here again," he said, without force, without
feeling of any sort.

She leant back against the pillow, holding a breath in her throat,
and her eyes wandered like a child that is frightened around the room,
passing his face and passing it again, yet fearing to rest upon it
for any appreciable moment of time.

When she found that he was going to say no more, she asked him why.
Just the one word, breathed rather than spoken, no complaint, no
rebellion, the pitiable simplicity of the question that the man puts
to his Fate, the woman to her Maker.

"Why?"

He at least was holding himself