“Is friendship all you want of me, Roddy?” she asked again.

She stood there waiting, a full minute, in silence.  Then she said, “You don’t have to tell me that.  Because I know.  Oh—­oh, my dear, how well I know!”

He didn’t come to her; just stood there, gripping the corner of her bookcase and staring at her silhouette, which was about all he could see of her against the window.  At last he said, in a strained dry voice she’d hardly have known for his: 

“If you know that—­if I’ve let you see that, then I’ve done just about the last despicable thing there was left for me to do.  I’ve come down here and—­made you feel sorry for me.  So that with that—­divine—­kindliness of yours, you’re willing to give me—­everything.”

He straightened up and came a step nearer.  “Well, I won’t have it, I tell you!  I don’t know how you guessed.  If I’d dreamed I was betraying that to you ...!  Don’t I know—­it’s burnt into me so that I’ll never forget—­what the memory of my love must be to you—­the memory of the hideous things it’s done to you.  And now, after all that—­after you’ve won your fight—­alone—­and stand where you stand now—­for me to come begging!  And take a gift like that!  I tell you it is pity.  It can’t be anything else.”

There was another minute of silence, and then he heard her make a little noise in her throat, a noise that would have been a sob had there not been something like a laugh in it.  The next moment she said, “Come over here, Roddy,” and as he hesitated, as if he hadn’t understood, she added, “I want you to look at me.  Over here by the window, where there’s light enough to see me by.”

He came wonderingly, very slowly, but at last, with her outstretched hand she reached him and drew him around between her and the window.

“Look into my face,” she commanded.  “Look into my eyes; as far in as you can.  Is it—­oh, my dearest”—­the sob of pure joy came again—­“is it pity that you see?”

She’d had her hands upon his shoulders, but now they clasped themselves behind his head.  Her vision of him had swum away in a blur, and without the support she got from him she’d have been swaying giddily.

“Roddy, old man,” she said, “if I hadn’t seen—­in the first—­ten minutes, the thing you—­meant so hard I shouldn’t see—­I think it would have—­killed me.  If I hadn’t seen that you loved me—­after all; after everything.  After all the tortures you’d suffered, through me.  Because that’s all I want—­in the world.”

At that he put his arms around her and pulled her up to him.  But the manner of it was so different from his old embraces that presently she drew him around so that what little light there was fell on his face, and searched it thoughtfully.

“You do believe me, Roddy, don’t you—­that there isn’t any pity about it?  There isn’t any room for pity.  There’s nothing in me at all but just a great big—­want of you.  Don’t you understand that?”