She was sobbing and nestling close against him.

For the first time his arms folded her gently and with sympathy, and she acknowledged it with a happy movement and a brightening face.

“It is too late,” he said.  He remembered Lizzie’s words.  “I am a sick man—­oh, not my body.  It is my soul, my brain.  I seem to have lost all values.  I care for nothing.  If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different.  It is too late, now.”

“It is not too late,” she cried.  “I will show you.  I will prove to you that my love has grown, that it is greater to me than my class and all that is dearest to me.  All that is dearest to the bourgeoisie I will flout.  I am no longer afraid of life.  I will leave my father and mother, and let my name become a by-word with my friends.  I will come to you here and now, in free love if you will, and I will be proud and glad to be with you.  If I have been a traitor to love, I will now, for love’s sake, be a traitor to all that made that earlier treason.”

She stood before him, with shining eyes.

“I am waiting, Martin,” she whispered, “waiting for you to accept me.  Look at me.”

It was splendid, he thought, looking at her.  She had redeemed herself for all that she had lacked, rising up at last, true woman, superior to the iron rule of bourgeois convention.  It was splendid, magnificent, desperate.  And yet, what was the matter with him?  He was not thrilled nor stirred by what she had done.  It was splendid and magnificent only intellectually.  In what should have been a moment of fire, he coldly appraised her.  His heart was untouched.  He was unaware of any desire for her.  Again he remembered Lizzie’s words.

“I am sick, very sick,” he said with a despairing gesture.  “How sick I did not know till now.  Something has gone out of me.  I have always been unafraid of life, but I never dreamed of being sated with life.  Life has so filled me that I am empty of any desire for anything.  If there were room, I should want you, now.  You see how sick I am.”

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes; and like a child, crying, that forgets its grief in watching the sunlight percolate through the tear-dimmed films over the pupils, so Martin forgot his sickness, the presence of Ruth, everything, in watching the masses of vegetation, shot through hotly with sunshine that took form and blazed against this background of his eyelids.  It was not restful, that green foliage.  The sunlight was too raw and glaring.  It hurt him to look at it, and yet he looked, he knew not why.

He was brought back to himself by the rattle of the door-knob.  Ruth was at the door.

“How shall I get out?” she questioned tearfully.  “I am afraid.”

“Oh, forgive me,” he cried, springing to his feet.  “I’m not myself, you know.  I forgot you were here.”  He put his hand to his head.  “You see, I’m not just right.  I’ll take you home.  We can go out by the servants’ entrance.  No one will see us.  Pull down that veil and everything will be all right.”