elf feel that
way,--you must not!" she exclaimed, with moistened eyes. "Are we not
your friends? It is your own fault if you will not let us be. You need
not be lonely."

"You are good to me beyond my power of understanding," I said, "but
don't you suppose that I know it is pity merely, sweet pity, but pity
only. I should be a fool not to know that I cannot seem to you as
other men of your own generation do, but as some strange uncanny
being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlornness
touches your compassion despite its grotesqueness. I have been so
foolish, you were so kind, as to almost forget that this must needs be
so, and to fancy I might in time become naturalized, as we used to
say, in this age, so as to feel like one of you and to seem to you
like the other men about you. But Mr. Barton's sermon taught me how
vain such a fancy is, how great the gulf between us must seem to you."

"Oh that miserable sermon!" she exclaimed, fairly crying now in her
sympathy, "I wanted you not to hear it. What does he know of you? He
has read in old musty books about your times, that is all. What do you
care about him, to let yourself be vexed by anything he said? Isn't it
anything to you, that we who know you feel differently? Don't you care
more about what we think of you than what he does who never saw you?
Oh, Mr. West! you don't know, you can't think, how it makes me feel to
see you so forlorn. I can't have it so. What can I say to you? How can
I convince you how different our feeling for you is from what you
think?"

As before, in that other crisis of my fate when she had come to me,
she extended her hands towards me in a gesture of helpfulness, and, as
then, I caught and held them in my own; her bosom heaved with strong
emotion, and little tremors in the fingers which I clasped emphasized
the depth of her feeling. In her face, pity contended in a sort of
divine spite against the obstacles which reduced it to impotence.
Womanly compassion surely never wore a guise more lovely.

Such beauty and such goodness quite melted me, and it seemed that the
only fitting response I could make was to tell her just the truth. Of
course I had not a spark of hope, but on the other hand I had no fear
that she would be angry. She was too pitiful for that. So I said
presently, "It is very ungrateful in me not to be satisfied with such
kindness as you have shown me, and are showing me now. But are you so
blind as not to see wh