He tugged fiercely, first at one end, then at the other, of the bristling, horizontal mustache.  Drusilla tried to speak calmly.

“He’s not making a sacrifice if there was nothing for him to give up.”

“That’s what I must find out.”

She considered it only loyal to say:  “It’s well to remember that in making the attempt you may do more harm than good.  ’Where the apple reddens, never pry, lest we lose our Edens’—­You know the warning.”

“Yes, I know.  That’s Browning.  In other words, it means, let well enough alone.”

“Which isn’t bad advice, you know.”

“Which isn’t bad advice—­except in love.  Love won’t put up with reserves.  It must have all—­or it will take nothing.”

He dropped into a low chair at the corner of the hearth.  Wielding the poker in both hands, he knocked sparks idly from a smoldering log.  It was some minutes before she ventured to say: 

“And suppose you discovered that you couldn’t get all?”

“I’ve thought that out.  I should go home, and ask to be allowed to join the first punitive expedition sent out—­one of those jolly little parties from which they don’t expect more than half the number to come back.  There’s one just starting now—­against the Carrals—­up on the Tibet frontier.  I dare say I could catch it.”

Again some minutes went by before she said:  “Is it as bad as all that?”

“It’s as bad as all that.”

She got up because she could no longer sit still.  His pain was almost more than she could bear.  At the moment she would have given life just to be allowed to lay her hand soothingly on his shoulder or to stroke his bowed head.  As it was, she could barely give herself the privilege of taking one step toward him, and even in doing this she was compelled to keep behind him, lest she should betray herself in the approach.

“Couldn’t I—?”

The offer of help was in the tone, in its timid beseeching.

He understood it, and shook his head without looking up.

“No,” he said, briefly.  “No.  No one can.”

She remained standing behind him, because she hadn’t the strength to go away.  He continued to knock sparks from the log.  Repulsed from the sphere of his suffering, she was thrown back on her own.  She wondered how long she should stand there, how long he would sit, bending like that, over the dying fire.  It was the most intolerable minute of her life, and yet he didn’t know it.  Just for the instant she resented that—­that while he could get the relief of openness and speech, she must be condemned forever to shame and silence.  If she could have thrown herself on her knees beside him and flung her arms about his neck, crying, “I love you; I love you!  Whoever doesn’t—­I do!—­I do!” she would have felt that life had reached fruition.

The minutes became more unendurable.  In sheer self-defense she was obliged to move, to say something, to break the tensity of the strain.  One step—­the single step by which she had dared to draw nearer him, stretching out yearning hands toward him—­one step sufficed to take her back to the world of conventionalities and commonplaces, where the heart’s aching is taboo.