Ste. Marie turned abruptly away from her and went across to one of the windows—­the window where she had stood earlier, looking out upon the dingy garden.  She saw him stand there, with his back turned, the head a little bent, the hands twisting together behind him, and a sudden fit of nervous shivering wrung her.  Every woman knows when a certain thing is going to be said to her, and usually she is prepared for it, though usually, also, she says she is not.  Miss Benham knew what was coming now, and she was frightened, not of Ste. Marie, but of herself.  It meant so very much to her—­more than to most women at such a time.  It meant, if she said yes to him, the surrender of almost all the things she had cared for and hoped for.  It meant the giving up of that career which old David Stewart had dwelt upon a month ago.

Ste. Marie turned back into the room.  He came a little way toward where the girl sat, and halted, and she could see that he was very pale.  A sort of critical second self noticed that he was pale and was surprised, because, although men’s faces often turn red, they seldom turn noticeably pale except in very great nervous crises—­or in works of fiction; while women, on the contrary, may turn red and white twenty times a day, and no harm done.  He raised his hands a little way from his sides in the beginning of a gesture, but they dropped again as if there was no strength in them.

“I told him,” said Ste. Marie, in a flat voice—­“I told your grandfather that I—­loved you more than anything in this world or in the next.  I told him that my love for you had made another being of me—­a new being.  I told him that I wanted to come to you and to kneel at your feet, and to ask you if you could give me just a little, little hope—­something to live for, a light to climb toward.  That is what we talked about, your grandfather and I.”

“Ste. Marie!  Ste. Marie!” said the girl, in a half whisper.  “What did my grandfather say to you?” she asked, after a silence.

Ste. Marie looked away.

“I cannot tell you,” he said.  “He—­was not quite sympathetic.”

The girl gave a little cry.

“Tell me what he said!” she demanded.  “I must know what he said.”

The man’s eyes pleaded with her, but she held him with her gaze, and in the end he gave in.

“He said I was a damned fool,” said Ste. Marie.

And the girl, after an instant of staring, broke into a little fit of nervous, overwrought laughter, and covered her face with her hands.

He threw himself upon his knees before her, and her laughter died away.  An Englishman or an American cannot do that.  Richard Hartley, for example, would have looked like an idiot upon his knees, and he would have felt it.  But it did not seem extravagant with Ste. Marie.  It became him.

“Listen!  Listen!” he cried to her, but the girl checked him before he could go on.