even to myself.  I have been accustomed to put sentiment aside—­to try and ignore it.  To feel as I did was itself so strange a thing to me, that I struggled to express it as prosaically as possible.  Well, then, you were astonished—­and repelled.  That I saw—­I realized it indeed more and more.  I saw that I had perhaps done a fatal thing, and I spent much time brooding and thinking.  I felt an acute distress, such as I had never felt in my life before—­so much so that I began even to avoid you, because I used to say to myself—­“She will go away some day—­perhaps soon—­and I must accustom myself to it.”  And yet—­’

He lifted the hand that shaded his eyes, and gave her a long touching look.

’Yet I felt sometimes that you knew what was happening in me—­and were sorry for me.  Then came the news of Desmond.  Of those days while he lay here—­of the days since—­I seem to know now hardly anything in detail.  One of the officers at the front said to me that on the Somme he often lost all count of time, of the days of the week, of the sequence of things.  It seemed to be all one present—­one awful and torturing now.  So it is with me.  Desmond is always here’—­he pointed to the vacant space by the window—­’and you are always sitting by him.  And I know that if you go away—­and I am left alone with my poor boy—­though I shall never cease to hear the things he said to me—­the things he asked me to do—­I shall have no strength to do them.  I cannot rise and walk—­unless you help me.’

Elizabeth could hardly speak.  She was in presence of that tremendous thing in human experience—­the emergence of a man’s inmost self.  That the Squire could speak so—­could feel so—­that the man whose pupil and bond-slave she had been in those early weeks should be making this piteous claim upon her, throwing upon her the weight of his whole future life, of his sorrow, of his reaction against himself, overwhelmed her.  It appealed to that instinctive, that boundless tenderness which lies so deep in the true woman.

But her will seemed paralysed.  She did not know how to act—­she could find no words that pleased her.  The Squire saw it, and began to speak again in the same low measured voice, as though he groped his way along, from point to point.  He sat with his eyes on the floor, his hands loosely clasped before him.

’I don’t, of course, dare to ask you to say—­at once—­if you will be my wife.  I dread to ask it—­for I am tolerably certain that you would still say no.  But if only now you would say, “I will go on with my work here—­I will help a man who is weak where I am strong—­I will show him new points of view—­give him new reasons for living—­“’

Elizabeth could only just check the sobs in her throat.  The sad humility of the words pierced her heart.

The Squire raised himself a little, and spoke more firmly.

’Why should there be any change yet awhile?  Only stay with us.  Use my land—­use me and all I possess—­for the country—­for what Desmond would have helped in—­and done.  Show me what to do.  I shall do it ill.  But what matter?  Every little helps.  “We have our backs to the wall.”  I have the power to give you power.  Teach me.’