Barbara’s brown eyes grew soft with sympathy, or was it tears?

“You are a curious creature, Alan,” she said.  “Why didn’t you take the L17,000 for that fetish of yours?  It would have been a fair deal and have set you on your legs.”

“I don’t know,” he answered dejectedly.  “It went against the grain, so what is the use of talking about it?  I think my old uncle Austin told me it wasn’t to be parted with—­no, perhaps it was Jeekie.  Bother the Yellow God! it is always cropping up.”

“Yes,” replied Barbara, “the Yellow God is always cropping up, especially in this neighbourhood.”

They walked on a while in silence, till suddenly Barbara sat down upon a bole of felled oak and began to cry.

“What is the matter with you?” asked Alan.

“I don’t know,” she answered.  “Everything goes wrong.  I live in a kind of gilded hell.  I don’t like my uncle and I loath the men he brings about the place.  I have no friends, I scarcely know a woman intimately, I have troubles I can’t tell you and—­I am wretched.  You are the only creature I have left to talk to, and I suppose that after this row you must go away too to make your living.”

Alan looked at her there weeping on the log and his heart swelled within him, for he had loved this girl for years.

“Barbara,” he gasped, “please don’t cry, it upsets me.  You know you are a great heiress——­”

“That remains to be proved,” she answered.  “But anyway, what has it to do with the case?”

“It has everything to do with it, at least so far as I am concerned.  If it hadn’t been for that I should have asked you to marry me a long while ago, because I love you, as I would now, but of course it is impossible.”

Barbara ceased her weeping, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and looked up at him.

“Alan,” she said, “I think that you are the biggest fool I ever knew—­not but that a fool is rather refreshing when one lives among knaves.”

“I know I am a fool,” he answered.  “If I wasn’t I should not have mentioned my misfortune to you, but sometimes things are too much for one.  Forget it and forgive me.”

“Oh! yes,” she said; “I forgive you; a woman can generally forgive a man for being fond of her.  Whatever she may be, she is ready to take a lenient view of his human weakness.  But as to forgetting, that is a different matter.  I don’t exactly see why I should be so anxious to forget, who haven’t many people to care about me,” and she looked at him in quite a new fashion, one indeed which gave him something of a shock, for he had not thought the nymph-like Barbara capable of such a look as that.  She and any sort of passion had always seemed so far apart.

Now after all Alan was very much a man, if a modest one, with all a man’s instincts, and therefore there are appearances of the female face which even such as he could not entirely misinterpret.