my impulse—­only I could save you from the lions.  I couldn’t protect you against everything, perhaps, but I could against the worst.  I know I’m stupid; I know I’m dull.  When I come near you, I’m like the clown who touches some exquisite tissue, spun of azure; but I’m like the clown who would fight for his treasure, and defend it from sacrilegious hands, and spend his last drop of blood to keep it pure.  It’s to be put in a position where I can’t do that that I find hard.  It’s to see you so defenceless—­”

“But I’m not defenceless.”

“Why not?  Whom have you?  Nobody—­nobody in this world but me.”

“Oh yes, I have.”

“Who?”

She smiled faintly at the fierceness of his brief question.

“It’s no one to whom you need feel any opposition, even though it’s some one who can do for me what you cannot.”

“What I cannot?”

“What you cannot; what no man can. Asperges me hyssopo, et mundabor.  Thou shalt purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean.  Derek, He has purged me with hyssop, even though it has not been in the way you think.  With the hyssop of what I’ve had to suffer He has purged me from so many things that now I see I can safely commit my cause to Him.”

“So that you don’t need me?”

She looked at him in silence before she replied: 

“Not for defence.”

“Nor for anything else?”

She tried to speak, but her voice failed her.

“Nor for anything else?” he asked again.

Her voice was faint, her head sank, her body trembled, but she forced the one word, “No.”

XXIII

“Mademoiselle has sent for me?” Bienville kissed the hand that Miss Grimston, without rising from her comfortable chair before the fire, lifted toward him.  The hand-screen with which she shielded her face protected her not only from the blaze, but from his scrutiny.  In the same way, the winter gloaming, with its uncertain light, nerved her against her fear of self-betrayal, giving her that assurance of being mistress of herself which she lacked when he was near.

“I did send for you.  I wanted to see you.  Won’t you sit down?”

“I’ve been expecting the summons,” he said, significantly, taking the seat on the other side of the hearth.

“Indeed?  Why?”

“I thought the day would come when you would be more just to me.”

“You thought I’d—­hear things?”

“Perhaps.”

“I have.  That’s why I asked you to come.”