“But is it obliged to be over?” she asked aloud.  “I could never care as she does.  I have always been like that, and I can’t change.  I have always been able to feel just so much and no more—­to give just so much and no more.”

He looked at her attentively, a little troubled, she could see, but not deeply hurt, not hurt enough to break down the wall which protected the secret—­or was it the emptiness?—­of his nature.

“Has the knowledge of my—­my old friendship for Mrs. Rokeby come between us?” he asked slowly and earnestly.

While he spoke it seemed to her that all that had been obscure in her view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze.  Nothing confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him.  The old sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it had arisen.  He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the mind, he lacked the single one of the heart.  Possessing every grace of character except humanity, he had failed in life because this one gift was absent.

“All my life,” she said brokenly, “I have tried to find something that I could believe in—­that I could keep faith with to the end.  But what can one build a world on except human relations—­except relations between men and women?”

“You mean,” he responded gravely, “that you think I have not kept faith with Mrs. Rokeby?”

“Oh, can’t you see?  If you would only try, you must surely see!” she pleaded, with outstretched hands.

He shook his head not in denial, but in bewilderment.  “I realized that I had made a mistake,” he said slowly, “but I believed that I had put it out of my life—­that we had both put it out of our lives.  There were so many more important things—­the war and coming face to face with death in so many forms.  Oh, I confess that what is important to you, appears to me to be merely on the surface of life.  I have been trying to fulfil other responsibilities—­to live up to the demands on me—­I had got down to realities—­”

A laugh broke from her lips, which had grown so stiff that they hurt her when she tried to smile.  “Realities!” she exclaimed, “and yet you must have seen her face as I saw it to-day.”

For the third time, in that expressionless tone which covered a nervous irritation, he repeated gravely, “I am sorry.”

“There is nothing more real,” she went on presently, “there is nothing more real than that look in the face of a living thing.”

For the first time her words seemed to reach him.  He was trying with all his might, she perceived, he was spiritually fumbling over the effort to feel and to think what she expected of him.  With his natural fairness he was honestly struggling to see her point of view.

“If it is really like that,” he said, “What can I do?”