rthy of her even through his
pain. "You think of me as something ethereal and angelic, and I'm not.
I'm only a woman, Ishmael, and the little things of life--friendship,
beauty, one's own kin--mean so much to me."

He had a confused idea she must mean the big things, but he waited
silently.

"Ishmael!" she said desperately; "it's no good, I'm not the sort of
woman who can throw up the whole of life for one thing. You will think
me mercenary, worldly, but I'm not; the old ties are too strong for me,
and I can't break them. It's my heart that breaks.... Oh, Ishmael,
Ishmael, I loved you so!"

Through all the inconsistencies of her words two salient facts stood out
to Ishmael--she was unhappy, and through him. His own pain lay numb, a
thing to be realised when he roamed the fields alone, and still more
intimately known when he had it for bed-and-hearth fellow in his dreary
house. Nature has provided that a great blow shall always stun for a
time; sensation stays quiescent as long as there still remains something
to be done; it is in the lonely hours after all action is over that pain
makes itself felt. Ishmael, if asked then, would have said his heart was
broken, but long afterwards he would see that no such merciful thing had
happened, and marvel how the cord of suffering can be strained to
breaking-point and kept taut, yet never snap. He was yet to learn that
no pain is unbearable, for the simple reason that it has to be borne.

"There's nothing to blame yourself about," he said. "You've given me the
most beautiful things to remember, and it's not your fault you can't
give more. When I think of what you are and what I have to offer I feel
I couldn't let you give more even if you would...." Always unfluent of
speech, he stopped abruptly, while a wheel of thought whirred round so
swiftly in his brain that he only caught a blurred impression. Ishmael
had had, perforce, to live as far as his mental life went in a world of
books, and with a vague resentment he felt that books had not played him
fair. Surely he had read, many times, of women who had thought the world
well lost for love--the hackneyed expression came so readily to him.
"She cares for me," he thought, with an odd mingling of triumph and
pain, "only she doesn't care enough. It's a half-shade, and the books
don't prepare one for the half-shades. Nobody can love without a
flaw--we all fail each other somewhere; it's like no one being quite
good or quite bad: no