Anne lay and silently watched him.  Her uncertainty regarding him had long since passed away.  Though she was far from understanding him, he had become an intimate friend, and she treated him as such.  True, he was unlike any other man she had ever met, but that fact had ceased to embarrass her.  She accepted him as he was.

He came back at length and sat down, smiling at her, though somewhat grimly.

“You will pardon your poor jester,” he said, “if he fails to make a joke on your last night.  He could make jokes—­plenty of them, but not of the sort that would please you.”

Anne said nothing.  She would not, if she could help it, betray to any how much she was dreading the morrow.  But she felt that he knew it in spite of her.

His next words revealed the fact.  “You are going to purgatory,” he said, “and I am going to perdition.  Do you know, I sometimes wonder if we shouldn’t do better to turn and fly in the face of the gods when they drive us too hard?  Why do we give in when we’ve nothing to gain and all to lose?”

She met his look with her steadfast eyes.  “Does duty count as nothing?” she said.

He made an impatient movement, and would have spoken, but she stopped him.

“Please don’t rail at duty.  I know your creed is pleasure, but the pursuit of pleasure does not, after all, bring happiness.”

“Who wants pleasure?” demanded Nap fiercely.  “That’s only the anesthetic when things get unbearable.  You use duty in the same way.  But what we both want, what we both hanker for, starve for, is just life!  Who cares if there is pain with it?  I don’t, nor do you.  And yet we keep on stunting and stultifying ourselves with these old-fashioned remedies for a disease we only half understand, when we might have all the world and then some.  Oh, we’re fools—­we’re fools!” His voice rang wildly passionate.  He flung out his arms as if he wrestled with something.  “We’ve been cheated for centuries of our birthright, and we still put up with it, still bring our human sacrifices to an empty shrine!”

And there he broke off short, checked suddenly at the height of his outburst though she had made no second effort to stop him.

Her quiet eyes had not flinched from his.  She had made no sign of shrinking.  With the utmost patience she had listened to him.  Yet by some means intangible the fiery stream of his rebellion was stayed.

There fell a brief silence.  Then he rose.  “I am afraid I am not fit for civilised society to-night,” he said.  “I will say good-bye.”  He held her hand for a moment.  “You will let me see you sometimes?”

“I hope to come now and then to Baronmead,” she answered quietly.  “But you will not—­please—­come to the Manor again.”

He looked down at her with eyes that had become inscrutable.  “I shall not come against your will,” he said.

“Thank you,” she answered simply.

And so he left her.