He spoke with manly kindness and reasonableness.  Not a trace of his habitual indolence or indifference.  Kitty, listening, was conscious of the most tempestuous medley of feelings—­love, remorse, shame, and a strange gnawing desolation.  What else, what better could she have asked of him?  And yet, as she looked at him, she thought suddenly of the moonlit garden at Grosville Park, and of that young, headlong chivalry with which he had thrown himself at her feet.  This man before her, so much older and maturer, counting the cost of his marriage with her in the light of experience, and magnanimously, resolutely paying it—­Kitty, in a flash, realized his personality as she had never yet done, his moral independence of her, his separateness as a human being.  Her passionate self-love instinctively, unconsciously, had made of his life the appendage of hers.  And now—?  His devotion had never been so plain, so attested; and all the while bitter, terrifying voices rang upon the inner ear, voices of fate, vague and irrevocable.

She dropped into a chair beside his table, trembling and white.

“No, no,” she said, drawing her handkerchief across her eyes, with a gesture of childish misery, “it’s all been a—­a horrid mistake.  Your mother was quite right.  Of course she hated your marrying me—­and now—­now she’ll see what I’ve done.  I guess perfectly what she’s thinking about me to-day!  And I can’t help it—­I shall go on—­if you let me stay with you.  There’s a twist—­a black drop in me.  I’m not like other people.”

Her voice, which was very quiet, gave Ashe intolerable pain.

“You poor, tired, starved child,” he said, kneeling down beside her.  “Put your arms round my neck.  Let me carry you up-stairs.”

With a sob she did as she was told.  Ashe’s library a comparatively late addition to the rambling, old-fashioned house, communicated by a small staircase at the back with his dressing-room above.  He lifted the small figure with ease, and half-way up-stairs he impetuously kissed the delicate cheek.

“I’m glad you’re not Polly Lyster, darling!”

Kitty laughed through her tears.  Presently he deposited her on the large sofa in her own room, and stood beside her, panting a little.

“It’s all very well,” said Kitty, as she nestled down among the pillows, “but we’re none of us feathers!”

Her eyes were beginning to recover a little of their sparkle.  She looked at him with attention.

“You look horribly tired.  What—­what did you do—­last night?” She turned away from him.

“I sat up reading—­then went to sleep down-stairs.  I thought the coach had come to grief, and you were somewhere with the Alcots.”

“If I had known that,” she murmured, “I might have gone to sleep.  Oh, it was so horrible—­the little stuffy room, and the dirty blankets.”  She gave a shiver of disgust.  “There was a poor baby, too, with whooping-cough.  Lucky I had some money.  I gave the woman a sovereign.  But she wasn’t at all nice—­she never smiled once.  I know she thought I was a bad lot.”