man's breath caught in his throat, he leaned sideways towards
her, her shoulder touching his elbow, the trailing plumes of her
hat--now limp from the clinging moisture of the fog--for a moment
brushing his cheek.

"Helen," he said rapidly, "don't you understand it's in your power to
alter all this? By accepting you would do infinitely more for me than I
could ever dream of doing for you. You'd give me something to think of
and plan about. If you'll only have whatever wretched money you need
now, and have more whenever you want it--if you'll let me feel, however
rarely we meet, that you depend on me and trust me and let me make
things a trifle easier and smoother for you, you will be doing such an
act of charity as few women have ever done. Don't refuse, for pity's
sake don't! I don't want to whine, but things were not precisely gay
before your coming, you know. Need it be added they promise to be less
so than ever after you are gone? So listen to reason. Do as I ask you.
Let me be of use in the only way I can."

"Do you consider what you propose?" Madame de Vallorbes asked, slowly.
"It is a good deal. It is dangerous. With most men such a compact would
be wholly inadmissible."

Then poor Dickie lost himself. The strain of the last week the young,
headlong passion aroused in him, the misery of his deformity, the
accumulated bitterness and rebellion of years arose and overflowed as a
great flood. Pride went down before it, and reticence, and decencies of
self-respect. Richard turned and rent himself, without mercy and, for
the moment, without shame. He pelted himself with cruel words, with
scorn and self-contempt, while he laughed, and the sound of that
laughter wandered away weirdly through the chill density of the fog,
under the tall, shadowy firs of the great avenue, over the
sombre-heather, out into the veiled, crowded darkness of the wide
woods.

"But I am not as other men are," he answered. "I am a creature by
myself, a unique development as much outside the normal social, as I am
outside the normal physical law. I--alone by myself--think of
it!--abnormal, extraordinary! You are safe enough with me, Helen. Safe
to indulge and humour me as you might a monkey or a parrot. All the
world will understand that! Only my mother, and a few old friends and
old servants take me seriously. To every one else I am an
embarrassment, a more or less distressing curiosity."--He met little
Lady Constance Quale's ruminant stare ag