“I?  Oh, I shouldn’t care a hang what anybody thought if I liked the girl,” he retorted.  His smile shone out warmly.  “Would you?” he demanded in his turn.

For an instant his blunt question disconcerted her, and while she hesitated she felt his blue eyes on her downcast face.  “You can’t judge by me,” she answered presently.  “Only those who have been in chains know the meaning of freedom.”

“Are you free now?”

“Not entirely.  Who is?”

He was looking at her more closely; and when at last she raised her eyelashes and met his gaze, the lovely glow which gave her beauty its look of October splendour suffused her features.  Anger seized her in the very moment that the colour rushed to her cheeks.  Why should she blush like a schoolgirl because of the way this man—­or any man—­looked at her?

“Are you going to marry Benham?” he asked; and there was a note in his voice which disturbed her in spite of herself.  Though she denied passionately his right to question her, she answered simply enough:  “Yes, I am going to marry him.”

“Do you care for him?”

With an effort she turned her eyes away and looked beyond the green stems and the white flowers of the narcissi in the window to the street outside, where the shadows of the young leaves lay like gauze over the brick pavement.

“If I didn’t care do you think that I would marry him?” she asked in a low voice.  Through the open window a breeze came, honey-sweet with the scent of narcissi, and she realized, with a start, that this early spring was poignantly lovely and sad.

“Well, I wish I’d known you twenty years ago,” said Vetch presently.  “If I’d had a woman like you to help me, I might have been almost anything.  Nobody knows better than I how much help a woman can be when she’s the right sort.”

She tore her gaze from the sunshine beyond, from the beauty and the wistfulness of April.  What was there in this man that convinced her in spite of everything that Benham had told her?

“Your wife has been dead a long time?” She spoke gently, for his tone more than his words had touched her sympathy.

As soon as she asked the question, she realized that it was a mistake.  An expressionless mask closed over his face, and she received the impression that he had withdrawn to a distance.

“A long time,” was all he answered.  His voice had become so impersonal that it was toneless.

“Well, it hasn’t kept you back—­not having help,” she hastened to reply as naturally as she could.  “You are almost everything you wished to be in the world, aren’t you?” It was a foolish speech, she felt, but the change in his manner had surprised and bewildered her.

He laughed shortly without merriment.  “I?” he replied, and she noticed for the first time that he looked tired and worried beneath his exuberant optimism.  “I am the loneliest man on earth.  The loneliest man on earth is the one who stands between two extremes.”  As she made no reply, he continued after a moment, “You think, of course, that I stand with one extreme, not in the centre, but you are mistaken.  I am in the middle.  When I try to bring the two millstones together they will grind me to powder.”