To this the girl says nothing, and Stephen, after a minute’s reflection, softens his words.

“Besides, your wife’s love, when she has children, is all given to them.”

“Yes,” murmurs her well-bred voice.  “Oh, yes, one is happier without them.”

Neither speak.  They are agreed so far; there is a deep relief and pleasure in the breast of each.

“Well,” he says at last, rousing himself, “I must go.  I shall be late for dinner.”

The girl leans down and stirs the fire into a leaping, yellow blaze.  It fills the room with light, and reveals them fully now to each other.

She makes no effort to detain him, and they look at each other, about to part.

The self-control of each is marvellous, and admirable for its mere thoroughness and completeness.

He has large eyes, and they stare down at her haggardly, as he stands facing her in the light.  The hungry, hopeless look in those eyes and the drawn lines in his face go to the girl’s heart, and to herself it seems literally melting into one warm flood of sympathy.

Ill! he looks ill and wretched, and she longs with a longing that presses upon her, till it is like a physical agony, to give some way to her feelings.

“Dearest, my dearest!” she is thinking, “if I might only tell you—­even a little—­”

And Stephen stares at the soft face and warm lips, half-paralyzed with desire to bend down and kiss them.  How would a kiss be? how would they—­And so there is a momentary, barely perceptible pause, filled with a painful intensity of feeling, to which neither gives way one hair’s breadth.  Then he gives a curt laugh.

“We have discussed rather a difficult problem and not settled it,” he says in a conventional tone.

“It seems to me quite simple,” murmurs the girl, with a throat so dry that the words are hardly audible.

He hears, but makes no reply beyond another slight laugh, as he holds out his hand.  The girl puts hers into it.  There is a moderate pressure only on either side, and then he goes out and shuts the door, leaving the girl standing motionless—­all the warm springs in her heart frozen by his last cynical laugh.

Brookes finds his way down the stairs, through the unlighted hall, and lets himself out in the chill October air.

He goes down the street feeling a confused sense of having inflicted pain and left distress behind him, but his own sensation of irritation, his own vexation and angry resentment against his lot in life, all but obliterate it.

For some seconds he walks on with all his thoughts merged together in a mere desperate and painful confusion.  “Only a hundred a year!” is his plainest, most bitter reflection.  “Five-and-twenty, and only earning a hundred a year!”

Brookes is not of a calm temperament.  His nervous system is tensely strung, and generally, owing to various incidental matters, slightly out of tune, or at anyrate, feels so.