came, but they did Longmore a world of good. He had always felt
indefinably afraid of her; her being had somehow seemed fed by a deeper
faith and a stronger will than his own; but her half-dozen smothered
sobs showed him the bottom of her heart and convinced him she was weak
enough to be grateful. "Excuse me," she said; "I'm too nervous to listen
to you. I believe I could have dealt with an enemy to-day, but I can't
bear up under a friend."

"You're killing yourself with stoicism--that's what is the matter with
you!" he cried. "Listen to a friend for his own sake if not for yours.
I've never presumed to offer you an atom of compassion, and you can't
accuse yourself of an abuse of charity."

She looked about her as under the constraint of this appeal, but it
promised him a reluctant attention. Noting, however, by the wayside the
fallen log on which they had rested a few evenings before, she went and
sat down on it with a resigned grace while the young man, silent before
her and watching her, took from her the mute assurance that if she was
charitable now he must at least be very wise.

"Something came to my knowledge yesterday," he said as he sat down
beside her, "which gave me an intense impression of your loneliness.
You're truth itself, and there's no truth about you. You believe in
purity and duty and dignity, and you live in a world in which they're
daily belied. I ask myself with vain rage how you ever came into such a
world, and why the perversity of fate never let me know you before."

She waited a little; she looked down, straight before her. "I like my
'world' no better than you do, and it was not for its own sake I came
into it. But what particular group of people is worth pinning one's