“I make no claim,” he said, hastily.  “I wish to know nothing which distresses you to tell me.”

“You have always done your duty,” she rejoined, with a faint smile.  “Let me take example from you, if I can, and try to do mine.”

“I am old enough to be your father,” he said, bitterly.  “Duty is more easily done at my age than it is at yours.”

His age was so constantly in his mind now that he fancied it must be in her mind too.  She had never given it a thought.  The reference he had just made to it did not divert her for a moment from the subject on which she was speaking to him.

“You don’t know how I value your good opinion of me,” she said, struggling resolutely to sustain her sinking courage.  “How can I deserve your kindness, how can I feel that I am worthy of your regard, until I have opened my heart to you?  Oh, don’t encourage me in my own miserable weakness!  Help me to tell the truth—­force me to tell it, for my own sake if not for yours!”

He was deeply moved by the fervent sincerity of that appeal.

“You shall tell it,” he said.  “You are right—­and I was wrong.”  He waited a little, and considered.  “Would it be easier to you,” he asked, with delicate consideration for her, “to write it than to tell it?”

She caught gratefully at the suggestion.  “Far easier,” she replied.  “I can be sure of myself—­I can be sure of hiding nothing from you, if I write it.  Don’t write to me on your side!” she added, suddenly, seeing with a woman’s instinctive quickness of penetration the danger of totally renouncing her personal influence over him.  “Wait till we meet, and tell me with your own lips what you think.”

“Where shall I tell it?”

“Here!” she said eagerly.  “Here, where you found me helpless—­here, where you have brought me back to life, and where I have first learned to know you.  I can bear the hardest words you say to me if you will only say them in this room.  It is impossible I can be away longer than a month; a month will be enough and more than enough.  If I come back—­” She stopped confusedly.  “I am thinking of myself,” she said, “when I ought to be thinking of you.  You have your own occupations and your own friends.  Will you decide for us?  Will you say how it shall be?”

“It shall be as you wish.  If you come back in a month, you will find me here.”

“Will it cause you no sacrifice of your own comfort and your own plans?”

“It will cause me nothing,” he replied, “but a journey back to the City.”  He rose and took his hat.  “I must go there at once,” he added, “or I shall not be in time.”

“It is a promise between us?” she said, and held out her hand.

“Yes,” he answered, a little sadly; “it is a promise.”

Slight as it was, the shade of melancholy in his manner pained her.  Forgetting all other anxieties in the anxiety to cheer him, she gently pressed the hand he gave her.  “If that won’t tell him the truth,” she thought, “nothing will.”