“No.  If you want to be very cruel you can say I’d no business to lay you under the obligation, but you can’t get out of it.”

She looked away.  Did she want to be very cruel?  Did she want to get out of it?  Might it not rather be happiness to be in it, immersed in it?  Lost in it, with all her scruples and all her pride?

His voice broke and trembled into passion.  “And what is it that I’m asking you to take?  Something that isn’t mine and is yours; something that it would be dishonourable of me to keep.  But if it was mine, it would be a little thing compared with what I wanted to give you and you wouldn’t have.”

Her hands in her distress had fallen to their old unconscious trick of stroking and caressing the thing they held, the one thing that he had given her, that she had not refused.  His eyes followed her movements.  She looked up and saw the jealous hunger in them.

She saw too, through his loose thin suit, that the lines of his body were sharper than ever.  His face was more than ever serious and clean cut; his eyes were more than ever sunk under the shadow of his brows, darkening their blue.  He was refined almost to emaciation.  And she saw other things.  As he sat there, with one leg crooked over the other, his wrists stretched out, his hands clasped, nursing his knee, she noticed that his cuffs, though clean, were frayed; that his coat was worn in places; that his boots were patched and broken at the sole.  He changed his attitude suddenly when he became aware of her gaze.  She did not know why she had not noticed these details before, nor why she noticed them now.  Perhaps she would not have seen them but for that attempt to hide them which revealed their significance.  She said to herself, “He is poor; and yet he has done this.”  And the love that had been so long hidden, sheltered and protected by her pity, came forth, and knew itself as love.  And she forgot his greatness and remembered only those pitiful human things in which he had need of her.  So she surrendered.

“I will take everything—­on one condition.  That you will give me—­what you said just now I wouldn’t have.”  The eyes that she lifted to his were full of tears.

For one moment he did not understand.  Very slowly he realized that the thing he had dreamed and despaired of, that he dared not ask for, was being divinely offered to him as a free gift.  There was no moment, not even in that night of his madness, in this room nine years ago, nor in that other night in Howland Street, when he had desired it as he desired it now.

Her tears hung curved on the curved lashes of her eyes, and spilt themselves, and fell one by one on to the pages of the manuscript.  He heard them fall.