“Mrs. Yarrow,” he returned, as if that were the answer, “I think I owe you an explanation.”

“Pay it!” she bantered, putting out her hand.

“I’m so poverty-stricken that I don’t know whether I can.  Did you ever notice anything odd about me?”

His directness seemed to have a right to directness from her.  “I noticed that you stared a good deal—­or used to.  But people do stare.”

“I stared because I saw things.”

“Saw things?”

“I saw whatever I thought of.  Whatever came into my mind was externated in a vision.”

She smiled, he could not make out whether uneasily or not.  “It sounds rather creepy, doesn’t it?  But it’s very interesting.”

“That’s what the doctor said; I’ve been to see him this morning.  May I tell you about my visions?  They’re not so creepy as they sound, I believe, and I don’t think they’ll keep you awake.”

“Yes, do,” she said.  “I should like of all things to hear about them.  Perhaps I’ve been one of them.”

“You have.”

“Oh!  Isn’t that rather personal?”

“I hope not offensively.”

He went on to tell her, with even greater fulness than he had told the doctor.  She listened with the interest women take in anything weird, and with a compassion for him which she did not conceal so perfectly but that he saw it.  At the end he said:  “You may wonder that I come to you with all this, which must sound like the ravings of a madman.”

“No—­no,” she hesitated.

“I came because I wished you to know everything about me before—­before—­I wouldn’t have come, you’ll believe me, if I hadn’t had the doctor’s assurance that my trouble was merely a part of my being physically out of kilter, and had nothing to do with my sanity—­Good Heavens!  What am I saying?  But the thought has tormented me so!  And in the midst of it I’ve allowed myself to—­Mrs. Yarrow, I love you.  Don’t you know that?”

Alford may have had a divided mind in this declaration, but after that one word Mrs. Yarrow had no mind for anything else.  He went on.

“I’m not only sick—­so sick that I sha’n’t be able to do any work for a year at least—­but I’m poor, so poor that I can’t afford to be sick.”

She lifted her eyes and looked at him, where she sat oddly aloof from those possessions of hers, to which she seemed so little related, and said, with a smile quivering at the corners of her pretty mouth, “I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

“What do you mean?” He stared at her hard.

“Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?”

“No, you’re only one, and there’s none like you!  I could never see any one else while I looked at you!” he cried, only half aware of his poetry, and meaning what he said very literally.

But she took only the poetry.  “I shouldn’t wish you to,” she said, and she laughed.