so fertile of contradictions--at once singularly superficial and
fugitive, and singularly vital. He did not care to analyse his own
feelings in respect of her. He had, so he told himself, never quite
cared to do that. She had wounded his pride shrewdly at times, still he
had unquestioning faith in her power of comprehending his meaning as
she sat there, graceful, long-limbed, indolent, in her pale dress,
looking towards the window, the light on her face revealing the fine
squareness of the chiselling of her profile, of her jaw, her nostril,
and brow. She appeared so free of spirit, so untrammeled, so
excellently exalted above all that is weak, craven, smirched by
impurity, capable of baseness and deceit!

"But naturally with me the case is different," he went on, his voice
growing deeper, his utterance more measured. "It is futile to resent
being reminded of that which, in point of fact, you never forget. It's
childish for the pot to call the kettle black. And so I came to the
conclusion, a few months ago, to put away all such childishness, and
set myself to gain whatever advantage I could from--well--from my own
blackness."

Honoria turned her head, averting her face yet further. Richard could
only see the outline of her cheek. She had never before heard him make
so direct allusion to his own deformity, and it frightened her a
little. Her heart beat curiously quick. For it was to her as though he
compelled her to draw near and penetrate a region in which, gazing
thitherward questioningly from afar, she had divined the residence of
stern and intimate miseries, inalienable, unremittent, taking their
rise in an almost alarming distance of time and fundamentally of cause.

"You see, in plain English," he said, "I look at all such unhappy
beings from the inside, not, as the rest of you do, merely from the
out. I belong to them and they to me. It is not an altogether
flattering connection. Only recently, I am afraid, have I had the
honesty to acknowledge it! But, having once done so, it seems only
reasonable to look up the members of my unlucky family and take care of
them, and if possible put them through--not on the lines of a
charitable institution, which must inevitably be a rather mechanical,
stepmother kind of arrangement at best, but on the lines of family
affection, of personal friendship."

He paused a moment.

"Does that strike you as too unpractical and fantastic, contrary to
sound, philanthropic principle a