All that was sweetest in the girl, all that was maternal and understanding, rose fiercely within her, stormed her with a desire to mother this man, to protect him from his own royal yet somehow infinitely sad self-denials.  For this moment she felt far stronger than he.  His hand, with the pencil in it, lay on the table close by her, and Cally closed her slim fingers over it with a firm clasp.

“Ah, don’t say that, Mr. V.V.—­don’t look that way.  It hurts me, in my heart....  Can’t I make you believe that you’ve accomplished more than anybody else in the world?...”

He did not move at the shock of her touch, at the sound of his little name upon these unaccustomed lips.  She was aware only of a subtle contraction, a sort of tightening going on somewhere within him.  So Cally finished her small speech with her hand over his.  But at just that point, a stir seemed to shake through the man; he was seen to be turning his head; and in the same breath, her moment of high strength broke abruptly.  The veins fluttered queerly in the forward hand; she felt a quick flush rising somewhere within, spreading and tingling upward into her face.  So Cally rose hurriedly, her hand withdrawn, and moved away.  But she did her best, for her pride’s sake, to envelop her movement with a matter-of-fact air; and when she had got about four steps away from him, she remarked, quite distinctly: 

“Don’t get up....  I ... want to get something.”

And she did, in fact, go on to mamma’s desk and attentively select three more sheets of note-paper, which would no doubt come in handy for something or other some day.

And out of the stillness behind her came Mr. V.V.’s voice, just a little husky now: 

“No one ever did anything so sweet to me before.”

But that only made things worse, turning a white light, as it were, on thoughts she had had before now of the loneliness of his life.  So she, finding herself not strong enough to be a comforter after all, said in a resolute kind of way: 

“I never like to hear my friends depreciated.  So please don’t do it any more....  What was the name of that book about factories—­the one you said that Mr. Pond had?”

Silence behind her, and then:  “‘The New Factory Idea,’ by T.B.  Halton.”

She noted this information carefully on one of her sheets of paper, thus proving that she was right to go and get them, all the time.

“I thought,” said she, “I might see if Saltman had it.  Then I could begin to cram to-night.”

But no, he said that Saltman hadn’t it, but would order it, of course.  And then the scraping of a chair-leg advised all listeners that Mr. V.V. was violating that injunction laid upon him as to not getting up....

He advanced round the table-end, his hand raised in his nervous and characteristic gesture.  So anyone who wished could see that deficiency at his elbow, about which he himself seemed so splendidly indifferent.  He was as tall as Hugo; but Hugo, with his lordly good looks and beautiful clothes, was certainly a much more eye-catching figure.  And yet, as she straightened now and looked, the knowledge shot suddenly through Cally that this doctor in his patches somehow looked, that he had always looked, rather the finer gentleman of the two....