to
every one. I haven't any--claim at all. I want to earn your friendship.
It's the biggest thing I've got to hope for. But I've no idea that you
can hand it out to me ready-made. I believe you'd do it if you could.
But you said once, yourself, that it wasn't a thing that could be given.
It was a thing that had to be earned. And you were right about that, as
you were about so many other things. Well, I'm going to try to earn it."
"Is that--all you want?" she asked, and then hearing the little gasp he
gave, she swung round quickly and looked at him. It was pretty dark in
the room, but his face in the dusk seemed to have whitened.

"Is friendship all you want of me, Roddy?" she asked again.

She stood there waiting, a full minute, in silence. Then she said, "You
don't have to tell me that. Because I know. Oh--oh, my dear, how well I
know!"

He didn't come to her; just stood there, gripping the corner of her
bookcase and staring at her silhouette, which was about all he could see
of her against the window. At last he said, in a strained dry voice
she'd hardly have known for his:

"If you know that--if I've let you see that, then I've done just
about the last despicable thing there was left for me to do. I've
come down here and--made you feel sorry for me. So that with
that--divine--kindliness of yours, you're willing to give
me--everything."

He straightened up and came a step nearer. "Well, I won't have it, I
tell you! I don't know how you guessed. If I'd dreamed I was betraying
that to you ...! Don't I know--it's burnt into me so that I'll never
forget--what the memory of my love must be to you--the memory of the
hideous things it's done to you. And now, after all that--after you've
won your fight--alone--and stand where you stand now--for me to come
begging! And take a gift like that! I tell you it _is_ pity. It can't be
anything else."

There was another minute of silence, and then he heard her make a little
noise in her throat, a noise that would have been a sob had there not
been something like a laugh in it. The next moment she said, "Come over
here, Roddy," and as he hesitated, as if he hadn't understood, she
added, "I want you to look at me. Over here by the window, where there's
light enough to see me by."

He came wonderingly, very slowly, but at last, with her outstretched
hand she reached him and drew him around between her and the window.

"Look into my face," she commanded. "Look into my eyes; as