The door had scarcely closed behind him before she sank back again into the chair, shaking with the passion of tears.  When they ran dry, she rose and crossed the room to the window, throwing it open.  The cold air blew refreshingly on to her face.  She pressed back the hair from her temples to let it reach her forehead.  It was like ice-water on the burning pulses of her nerves.  She took deep breaths of it, thankful from her heart for the release.  When, at last, Traill knocked upon the door, she could turn with brave assurance and bid him enter.  He came in with questioning eyes that lost their querulousness the moment they had found her face.

“You’re better?” he said at once.

“Yes.”  She smiled reassuringly.  “I’m absolutely all right now.”

He looked at her eyes, red with weeping.  He knew she had been crying—­had heard her sobs from the other room.  Part of her secret then, at least, he had realized.  She was fond of him.  How fond, it would be more or less impossible to divine; but it must be nipped there—­strangled utterly—­if he were to fulfil her expectations of him.  What it was that pressed him to the sacrifice, he could not actually say; unless it were that it appealed to his better nature as a thing of shame to do otherwise.  She would marry him, he felt sure of that.  But marriage, with all its accompanying conventions and indissoluble bonds—­indissoluble, except through the loathsome medium of the divorce court—­was a condition of life that his whole nature shrank from.  He refused it utterly.  This girl—­this little child—­perhaps saw no other termination to their acquaintance than that of marriage, and either this thought had become a brake upon his desire, or he wished, in the honesty of his heart, to treat her well; whatever it was, there was not that in his mind which made him determine to be the one to teach her otherwise.

“Well, now sit down, don’t stand about,” he said kindly.  “You can’t be really as strong as you think yet, and I’ve got something I want to say to you.  Take this chair, it’s about the most comfortable there is here, and I’ll get that pillow for your back.”

His voice was soft—­gentle even—­in the consideration that he showed.  To himself, he was striving to make amends; to her, he was that tenderness which she knew lay beneath the iron crust of his harder nature.

When she was seated, when he had placed the pillow at her back, he took a well-burnt pipe—­the well-burnt pipe that he had smoked before under other circumstances than these—­and filled it slowly from a tobacco jar.

Sally watched all his movements patiently, until she could wait for his words no longer.

“What have you to say?” she asked.

He lit the pipe before replying; drew it till the tobacco glowed like a little smelting furnace in the bowl, and the smoke lifted in blue clouds, then he rammed his finger on to the burning mass with cool intent, as though the fire of it could not pain him.