“So glad to have met you!” continued the same good man to Bernal.  “Your words are conducive to thought—­you’re an earnest, decent lad at all events.”

But Bernal scarcely heard them or identified the speakers.  They were to him but so many noisy wheels of the vast machine, each revolving as it must.  His whole body seemed to send electric sparks of repulsion out to them to drive them away as quickly as might be.  All his energies were centred to one mighty impulse.

At last the door closed and he stood alone with the disordered table and the pushed back chairs, doggedly gathering himself.  Then he went to the doors and with a hand to each, pushed them swiftly apart.

She stood at the farther side of the room.  She seemed to have fled there, and yet she leaned toward him breathless, again with the under lip caught fast in its quivering—­helpless, piteously helpless.  It was this that stayed him.  Had she utterly shrunk away, even had he found her denying, defiant—­the aroused man had prevailed.  But seeing her so, he caught at the back of a chair as if to hold himself.  Then he gazed long and exultingly into the eyes yielded so abjectly to his.  For a moment it filled him to see and know, to be certain that she knew and did not deny.  But the man in him was not yet a reasoning man—­too lately had he come to life.

He stepped eagerly toward her, to halt only when one weak white hand faltered up with absurd pretension of a power to ward him off.  Nor was it her hand that made him stop then.  That barrier confessed its frailness in every drooping line.  Again it was the involuntary submission of her whole poise—­she had actually leaned a little further toward him when he started, even as her hand went up.  But the helpless misery in her eyes was still a defense, passive but sufficient.

Then she spoke and his tension relaxed a little, the note of helpless suffering in her voice making him wince and fall back a step.

“Bernal, Bernal, Bernal!  It hurts me so, hurts me so!  It’s the Gratcher—­isn’t it hurting you, too?  Oh, it must be!”

He retreated a little, again grasping the back of the chair with one hand, but there was no restraint in his voice.

“Laugh, Nance, laugh!  You know what laughing does to them!”

“Not to this one, Bernal—­oh, not to this one!”

“But it’s only a Gratcher, Nance!  I’ve been asleep all these years.  Now I’m awake.  I’m in the world again—­here, do you understand, before you.  And it’s a glad, good world.  I’m full of its life—­and I’ve money—­think of that!  Yesterday I didn’t know what money was.  I was going to throw it away—­throw it away as lightly as I threw away all those good, precious years.  How much it seems now, and what fine, powerful stuff it is!  And I, like a sleeping fool, was about to let it go at a mere suggestion from Allan.”

He stopped, as if under the thrust of a cold, keen blade.