it hadn't been for that I should have asked you to marry me a long
while ago, because I love you, as I would now, but of course it is
impossible."

Barbara ceased her weeping, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand,
and looked up at him.

"Alan," she said, "I think that you are the biggest fool I ever
knew--not but that a fool is rather refreshing when one lives among
knaves."

"I know I am a fool," he answered. "If I wasn't I should not have
mentioned my misfortune to you, but sometimes things are too much for
one. Forget it and forgive me."

"Oh! yes," she said; "I forgive you; a woman can generally forgive a
man for being fond of her. Whatever she may be, she is ready to take
a lenient view of his human weakness. But as to forgetting, that is
a different matter. I don't exactly see why I should be so anxious to
forget, who haven't many people to care about me," and she looked at him
in quite a new fashion, one indeed which gave him something of a shock,
for he had not thought the nymph-like Barbara capable of such a look as
that. She and any sort of passion had always seemed so far apart.

Now after all Alan was very much a man, if a modest one, with all a
man's instincts, and therefore there are appearances of the female face
which even such as he could not entirely misinterpret.

"You--don't--mean," he said doubtfully, "you don't really mean----" and
he stood hesitating before her.