“Let me sit down,” he said unwilling to leave her; “I am tired.”  He was terribly afraid of himself and shaken by a storm of passion, which left his sensitive body feeble.

She sat down with him on a great trunk wrecked a century ago.  “Are you not well?” she asked, observing the paleness of his face.

“No, it is nothing.  I am not very well, but it is nothing of moment.  Don’t let it trouble you—­I am much as usual.  I want, Leila, what I cannot get—­what I ought not to get.”  Even this approach to fuller confession relieved him.

“What is there, my dear Mr. Rivers, you cannot get?  Oh! you are a man to envy with your hold on men, your power to charm, your eloquence.  I have heard Dr. McGregor talk of what you were among the wounded and the dying on the firing-line.  Don’t you know that you are one of God’s helpful messengers, an interpreter into terms of human thought and words of what men need to-day, when—­”

“No, no,” he broke in, lifting a hand of dissenting protest.  The flushed young face as she spoke, his sense of being nobly considered by this earnest young woman had again made him feel how just the little more would have set free in ardent words what he was honestly striving to control.

“Thank you, my dear Leila, I could wish I were all you think I am; but were it all true, there would remain things that sweeten life and which must always be forbidden to me.”

He rose to his feet once again master of his troubled soul.  “I leave you,” he said, “and your tireless youth to your walk.  We cannot have everything, I must be contented in some moment of self-delusion to half believe the half of what you credit me with.”

“Then,” cried Leila, laughing, “you would have only a fourth.”

“Ah!  I taught you arithmetic too well.”  He too laughed as he turned away.  Laughter was rare with him and to smile frequent.  He walked slowly away to the rectory and for two days was not seen at Grey Pine.

Leila, more at ease and relieved by the final gay banter, strolled into the solemn quiet of the pines the Squire had so successfully freed from underbrush and left in royal solitude.  At the door of the old log-cabin she lay down on the dry floor of pine-needles.  The quick interchange of talk had given her no chance to consider, as now she reviewed in thoughtful illumination, what had seemed to her strange.  She tried to recall exactly what he had said.  Of a sudden she knew, and was startled to know.  She had come into possession of the power of a woman innocent of intention to inflict pain on a strong and high-minded man.  A lower nature might have felt some sense of triumph.  It left her with no feeling but the utmost distress and pitiful thinking of what had gone wrong in this man’s life.  Once before she had been thus puzzled.  The relief of her walk was gone.  She gathered some imperfect comfort in the thought that she might not have been justified in her conclusions regarding a man who was in so many ways an unexplained personality.