“And you’ve done splendidly, Robert, better than any of us.”

“I’ve been a failure,” he answered, “a rotten failure!”

She accepted the statement gravely, without protest, and that sincerity was like a skilled hand on a wound.  It brought comfort where a fumbling kindness would have been unendurable.  It made him strangely, deeply happy to know that she would see too that he had failed.  “I’ve never had pity on anyone—­not even myself—­I’ve learnt nothing that matters.”

For a while they sat silent, looking into the fire, like people who are waiting and preparing themselves for some great event.  And presently, without moving, in an undertone he began to tell her about the Marie Dubois who had died, and how he had seen her long ago at the Circus, his first and only circus.  He told her about the Circus itself.  He did not choose his words, but stammered and fumbled and jumped from one thing to another.  He opened his heart and took out whatever he found there, and showed it to her very humbly, just as it was.  It seemed certain and imperative that after a little while they should both see the pattern of it all.  He told her about his love for his dead mother, and how his father had died and had come back, haunting him in his sleep.

Then he remembered something he had never thought of before—­how he had looked up at the window of the room where his father was lying dead, and had wanted to run—­run fast.

“But I think I’ve lived in that dark house all my life,” he said, “and I’ve gone about in it, blustering and swaggering and being hard and strong because I was so desperately afraid—­of life, of caring too much, of failing.  And now—­I’ve come out.”

And then he began to tremble all over and suddenly he was crying helplessly.

She knelt beside him.  She drew him into her arms.  It was their moment in the green forest over again, but now there was no antagonism in their love.  She was the warm, good spirit of the life to which he had become reconciled.  They had belonged to one another from the beginning.  His fear had stood between them.  But she had gone on loving him, steadfastly, because nothing else was possible to her.

“Francey—­do you remember—­that time we fought one another—­over an idiotic stick?  I was such a young rotter—­I wouldn’t own up—­that you were stronger than I was.”

She took his wet hands and kissed them.  It was as though she had said aloud, smiling to herself: 

“It’s all right now, anyhow, you odd, sad little boy.”