Her eyes brimmed.  “You are the only person who cares about that, Abel.”

“Why shouldn’t I care?  You are the best and the cleverest girl I know,” he returned.

Her gratitude fanned his sympathy, which was beginning to smoulder, and he felt again the pleasant sense of being in the position of benefactor rather than of the benefited.  His eyes rested without shrinking on her sallow face, with the faint bluish tinge to the eyelids, and on her scant drab coloured hair, which was combed smoothly back from her forehead—­and while he looked his pity clothed itself in the softer and gentler aspect of reason.  “She ought to be happy,” he thought.  “It’s a shame they should lead her such a life!  It’s a shame some good man doesn’t fall in love with her and marry her.  She’s really not so plain, after all.  I’ve seen many women who were worse looking than she is.”  Unknown to him, an illusion was gradually shedding colour and warmth on his vision of her.  Mentally, he had endowed her with all the sober and saner virtues to which his present mood was committed—­though he had, in reality, no better reason for so doing than the fact that she evidently esteemed him and that she was deserving of pity.  The discordant forces of passion no longer disturbed the calm and orderly processes of his mind, and he told himself that he saw clearly, because he saw stark images of facts, stripped not only of the glamour of light and shade, but even of the body of flesh and blood.  Life spread before him like a geometrical figure, constructed of perfect circles and absolutely conformable to the rules and the principles of mathematics.  That these perfect circles should ever run wild and become a square was clearly unthinkable.  Because his nature was not quiescent it was impossible for him to conceive of it in motion.

And all the while, in that silence, which seemed so harmless while it was, in reality, so dangerous, the repressed yet violent force in Judy wrought on his mood in which bare sense and bare thought were unprotected by any covering of the love which had clothed them as far back as he could remember.  That breathless, palpitating appeal for happiness—­an appeal which is as separate from beauty as the body of flesh is separate from the garment it wears—­was drawing him slowly yet inevitably toward the woman at his side.  Her silence—­charged as it was with the intoxicating spirit of June—­had served the purpose of life as neither words nor gestures could have done.  It had reconciled him to her presence in the very moment that made him conscious of the strength of his pity.

Presently, as they drove through the burned out clearing, she spoke again.

“I wonder why you are always so good to me, Abel?”