“One lives and learns.”  The tone of the words was serious—­a little anxious.  Then the speaker took up his hat.  “But I’m not good at managing touchy people.  Good night.”

Her hand passed into his.  The little fingers were cold; he could not help enclosing them in a warm, clinging grasp.  The firelit room, the dark street outside, and the footsteps of the passers-by—­they all melted from consciousness.  They only saw and heard each other.

In another minute the outer door had closed behind them.  Connie was left still in the same attitude, one hand on the chair, her head drooping, her heart in a dream.

Falloden ran through the streets, choosing the by-ways rather than the thoroughfares.  The air was frosty, the December sky clear and starlit, above the blue or purple haze, pierced with lights, that filled the lower air; through which the college fronts, the distant spires and domes showed vaguely—­as beautiful “suggestions”—­“notes”—­from which all detail had disappeared.  He was soon on Folly Bridge, and hurrying up the hill he pushed straight on over the brow to the Berkshire side, leaving the cottage to his right.  Fold after fold of dim wooded country fell away to the south of the ridge; bare branching trees were all about him; a patch of open common in front where bushes of winter-blossoming gorse defied the dusk.  It was the English winter at its loveliest—­still, patient, expectant—­rich in beauties of its own that summer knows nothing of.  But Falloden was blind to it.  His pulses were full of riot.  She had been so near to him—­and yet so far away—­so sweet, yet so defensive.  His whole nature cried out fiercely for her.  “I want her!—­I want her! And I believe she wants me.  She’s not afraid of me now—­she turns to me.  What keeps us apart?  Nothing that ought to weigh for a moment against our double happiness!”

He turned and walked stormily homewards.  Then as he saw the roof and white walls of the cottage through the trees his mood wavered—­and fell.  There was a life there which he had injured—­a life that now depended on him.  He knew that, more intimately than Connie knew it, often as he had denied it to her.  And he was more convinced than Otto himself—­though never by word or manner had he ever admitted it for a moment—­that the boy was doomed—­not immediately, but after one of those pitiful struggles which have their lulls and pauses, but tend all the same inevitably to one end.

“And as long as he lives, I shall look after him,” he thought, feeling that strange compulsion on him again, and yielding to it with mingled eagerness and despair.

For how could he saddle Connie’s life with such a charge—­or darken it with such a tragedy?