“I am so glad, dear friend,” she said, holding his hand for a moment as she sat beside him.

He looked at her silently with his brilliant eyes which burned in the midst of his blanched and withered face like two watch-fires that are kept alive in a scorched desert.

“For a while I thought it might be,” he replied after a long pause.  “I asked you to give me what I have never had—­my youth.  You could not do it,” he added with a smile, “and at first it seemed to me that there remained only emptiness and disappointment for the future, but presently I learned wisdom in the night.”  He hesitated an instant and then added gravely, “I saw that if you couldn’t give me youth, you could at least make my old age very pleasant.”

“I can—­I will,” she answered in a broken voice, and it seemed to her that all the bitterness had turned to sweetness in his look.  Was the divine wisdom, after all, she wondered, not so much the courage which turned the events that came to happiness as the greater power which created light where there was nothing.  Only age had learned to do this, she knew, and she was conscious of a quick resentment against fate that only age could put into passion the immortal spirit which youth craved in vain.

“I asked a great deal,” he said, “but I shall be content with a very little.”

“With my whole faith—­with all my friendship,” she replied; and as she spoke the words, her heart contracted with a spasm which was almost that of terror of the unknown purpose to which she felt, with a kind of superstitious blindness, that she was pledged.  Fate had offered her this one good thing, and she must put it from her because she waited in absolute ignorance—­for what?  For love it might be, and yet her woman’s instinct taught her that the only love which endures is the love of age that has never been young for youth so elastic that it can never grow old.  Then swift as the flash of self-revelation she saw in imagination the eager yet humble look with which Arnold Kemper had waited before her door, and, though she insisted still that the picture displeased her fancy, she knew that passion to meet response in her must come to her clothed in a virile strength like his.

“I wish from my soul that it might have been,” she murmured, but even with the words she knew that she had all her life wished for a different thing—­for a love that was wholly unlike the love he offered.

“It has been,” he answered, while his grave gentleness fell like dew on the smouldering fire in his eyes.  “It has been, my dear, and it will be always until I die.”

CHAPTER IX

OF MASQUES AND MUMMERIES

In the afternoon of the next day Laura received by a special messenger an urgent appeal from Gerty Bridewell.

“Come to me at once,” said the note, which appeared to have been written in frantic haste.  “I am in desperate trouble and I need you.”