“Tell me,” she said, bending over the arm of her chair and speaking in a low, eager voice, “he is beginning to forget it?”

Hallin looked at her in silence, but his half sad, half ironic smile suggested an answer from which she turned away.

“If he only would!” she said, speaking almost to herself, with a kind of impatience.  “He ought to marry, for everybody’s sake.”

“I see no sign of his marrying—­at present,” said Hallin, drily.

He began to put some papers under his hand in order.  There was a cold dignity in his manner which she perfectly understood.  Ever since that day—­that never-forgotten day—­when he had come to her the morning after her last interview with Aldous Raeburn—­come with reluctance and dislike, because Aldous had asked it of him—­and had gone away her friend, more drawn to her, more touched by her than he had ever been in the days of the engagement, their relation on this subject had been the same.  His sweetness and kindness to her, his influence over her life during the past eighteen months, had been very great.  In that first interview, the object of which had been to convey to her a warning on the subject of the man it was thought she might allow herself to marry, something in the manner with which he had attempted his incredibly difficult task—­its simplicity, its delicate respect for her personality, its suggestion of a character richer and saintlier than anything she had yet known, and unconsciously revealing itself under the stress of emotion—­this something had suddenly broken down his pale, proud companion, had to his own great dismay brought her to tears, and to such confidences, such indirect askings for help and understanding as amazed them both.

Experiences of this kind were not new to him.  His life consecrated to ideas, devoted to the wresting of the maximum of human service from a crippling physical weakness; the precarious health itself which cut him off from a hundred ordinary amusements and occupations, and especially cut him off from marriage—­together with the ardent temperament, the charm, the imaginative insight which had been his cradle-gifts—­these things ever since he was a lad had made him again and again the guide and prop of natures stronger and stormier than his own.  Often the unwilling guide; for he had the half-impatient breathless instincts of the man who has set himself a task, and painfully doubts whether he will have power and time to finish it.  The claims made upon him seemed to him often to cost him physical and brain energy he could ill spare.

But his quick tremulous sympathy rendered him really a defenceless prey in such matters.  Marcella threw herself upon him as others had done; and there was no help for it.  Since their first memorable interview, at long intervals, he had written to her and she to him.  Of her hospital life, till to-night, she had never told him much.  Her letters had been the passionate outpourings of a nature sick of itself,