“Why should you torment yourself so?” he asked her, kindly.  Her hand had dropped and lay beside her on the bench.  To his own amazement he found himself clasping it.  “Isn’t it better to forget old griefs?  You can’t help what happened years ago—­you can’t undo it.  You’ve got to live your own life—­happily!  And I just wish you’d set about it.”

He smiled at her, and there were few faces more attractive than his when he let his natural softness have its way, without irony.  She let her eyes be drawn to his, and as they met he saw a flush rise in her clear skin and spread to the pale gold of her hair.  The man in him was marvellously pleased by that flush—­fascinated, indeed.  But she gave him small time to observe it; she drew herself impatiently away.

“Of course, you don’t understand a word about it,” she said, “or you couldn’t talk like that.  But I’ll tell you.”  Her eyes, half miserable, half audacious, returned to him.  “My sister—­came here—­because I sent for her.  I made mademoiselle go with a letter.  Of course, I knew there was a mystery—­I knew the Grosvilles did not want us to meet—­I knew that she and maman hated each other.  But maman will tell me nothing—­and I have a right to know.”

“No, you have no right to know,” said Ashe, gravely.

She looked at him wildly.

“I have—­I have!” she repeated, passionately.  “Well, I told my sister to meet me here—­I had forgotten, you see, all about you!  My mind was so full of Alice.  And when she came I felt as if it was a dream—­a horrible, tragic dream.  You know—­she is so like me—­which means, I suppose, that we are both like papa.  Only her face—­it’s not handsome, oh no—­but it’s stern—­and—­yes, noble!  I was proud of her.  I would like to have gone on my knee and kissed her dress.  But she would not take my hand—­she would hardly speak to me.  She said she had come, because it was best, now that I was in England, that we should meet once, and understand that we couldn’t meet—­that we could never, never be friends.  She said that she hated my mother—­that for years she had kept silence, but that now she meant to punish maman—­to drive her from London.  And then”—­the girl’s lips trembled under the memory—­“she came close to me, and she looked into my eyes, and she said, ’Yes, we’re like each other—–­we’re like our father—­and it would be better for us both if we had never been born—­’”

“Ah, cruel!” cried Ashe, involuntarily, and once more his hand found Kitty’s small fingers and pressed them in his.

Kitty looked at him with a strange, exalted look.

“No.  I think it’s true.  I often think I’m not made to be happy.  I can’t ever be happy—­it’s not in me.”

“It’s in you to say foolish things then!” said Ashe, lightly, and crossing his arms he tried to assume the practical elder-brotherly air, which he felt befitted the situation—­if anything befitted it.  For in truth it seemed to him one singularly confused and ugly.  Their talk floated above tragic depths, guessed at by him, wholly unknown to her.  And yet her youth shrank from it knew not what—­“as an animal shrinks from shadows in the twilight.”  She seemed to him to sit enwrapped in a vague cloud of shame, resenting and hating it, yet not able to escape from thinking and talking of it.  But she must not talk of it.