“Emily,” he said at last.

She raised herself abruptly on her arms, and gazed at him over her shoulder with large, tearless, frightened eyes.

“Edmund,” she whispered doubtfully.  “Edmund.”

“Yes, Emily,” he answered in a soothing voice, as one speaks to a frightened child.  “I have come to see you and to speak with you.”

“You have come to see me, Edmund,” she repeated mechanically.  Then, as if the situation were gradually dawning upon her, “You have come to see me.”

His role had appeared so easy as he had hastily sketched it on the way,—­gratitude on her part, forgiveness on his, and then a speedy reconciliation.  But it was the exquisite delicacy of Storm’s nature which made him shrink from appearing in any way to condescend, to patronize, to forgive, where perhaps he needed rather to be forgiven.  A strange awkwardness had come over him.  He felt himself suddenly to be beyond his depth.  How unpardonably blunt and masculinely obtuse he had been in dealing with this beautiful and tender thing, which God had once, for a short time, intrusted to his keeping!  How cruel and wooden that moral code of his by which he had relentlessly judged her, and often found her wanting!  What an effort it must have cost her finer-grained organism to assimilate his crude youthful maxims, what suffering to her tiny feet to be plodding wearily in his footsteps over the thorny moral wastes which he had laid behind him!  All this came to him, as by revelation, as he sat gazing into Emily’s face, which looked very pathetic just then, with its vague bewilderment and its child-like surrender of any attempt to explain what there was puzzling in the situation.  Storm was deeply touched.  He would fain have spoken to her out of the fulness of his heart; but here again that awkward morality of his restrained him.  There were, unfortunately, some disagreeable questions to be asked first.

Storm stared for a while with a pondering look at the floor; then he carefully knocked a speck of dust from the sleeve of his coat.

“Emily,” he said at last, solemnly.  “Is your husband still alive?”

It was the bluntest way he could possibly have put it, and he bit his lip angrily at the thought of his awkwardness.

“My husband,” answered Emily, suddenly recovering her usual flute-like voice (and it vibrated through him like an electric shock)—­“is he alive?  No, he is dead—­was killed in the Danish war.”

“And were you very happy with him, Emily?  Was he very good to you?”

It was a brutish question to ask, and his ears burned uncomfortably; but there was no help for it.

“I was not happy,” answered she simply, and with an unthinking directness, as if the answer were nothing but his due; “because I was not good to him.  I did not love him, and I never would have married him if mother had not died.  But then, there was no one left who cared for me.”