“I have given you the absolute right to do that,” he told her.  “It will only bring me pleasure, to—­to suppose I interest you enough—­”

“Ah, but you do,” she cried with clasping fingers.  “It has made my work here very difficult; the quiet has gone before echoes that I think every child must hear, echoes from spaces and things that appall me.  Here, you see, I have lived so apart from others, perhaps selfishly, that I had grown accustomed to a false sense of peace.  Only lessons and little questions, little hands.  It seems now that I have been outside of life itself, in a cowardly seclusion.  Yet it had always been that way; I didn’t know.”  Her face was deeply troubled, the clear depths of her eyes held a new questioning doubt.

“It’s because of that, mainly, I ask you to marry me,” he replied, standing before the table at which, unconsciously, she had taken her place; “it is because of your astonishing purity.  You are so beautiful; and this quiet, peace—­you must have it all your life; it is the air, the garden air, for you to flower in.  I can give it to you, miles of it, farther than you can see.  All that you care for heaped about you.  But not that only,” he insisted, “for I realized that no one lives to whom such things are less; I can give you something more, not to be talked about; whatever my life has been it has at least brought me to your feet.  I have learned, for you, that there is a thing men must have, God knows exactly what—­a craving to be satisfied, a—­a reaching.  And that itself, the knowledge of such need, is not without value.  Because of it I again, and shall again, if necessary, ask you to marry me.”

She replied in a low voice.  “You must marry the child’s mother.”  For the first time she avoided him; bright blood burned in her cheeks; a hand on the edge of the table was straining, white.  A sudden feeling of helplessness came over him, with, behind it, the ever-present edge of anger, of impatience.  He took a step forward, as if to crush, by sheer insistence, her opposition; but he stopped.  He lost entirely the sense of her fragile physical being; she seemed only a spirit, shining and high, and insuperably lovely.  Then all feeling was lost but the realization that he could not—­in any true sense—­live without her.  “Susan,” he said, leaning forward, “you must marry me.  Do you care for me at all?”

Her breast rose and fell under the delicate contour of her wool gown.  “The child’s mother,” she repeated, “you should marry her.  How can you do differently?  What can it matter if I care about you?” She raised a miserable face.  “How can I?” she asked.

He could think of no other answer than to repeat his supreme necessity for her.  He struggled to tell her that this was an altogether different man from Essie Scofield’s companion; but his words were unconvincing, limited by the inhibition of custom.  A transparent dusk deepened in the room accompanied by a pause only broken by the faint explosions of the soft coal.  The power of persuasion, of speech, appeared to have left him.  There must be some convincing thing to say, some last, all-powerful, argument.  It eluded him.  The exasperation returned, spreading through his being.