“You are pale; and your hand! see, how it trembles!”

Slowly withdrawing it from the rail where it had rested, she sent one quick glance his way and, in a low voice, said: 

“I have not slept since that night.”

“Four days!” he murmured.  Then, after a moment of silence, “You bore yourself so bravely at the time, I thought, or rather, I hoped, that success had made you forget the horror.  I could not have slept myself, if I had known—­”

“It is part of the price I pay,” she broke in gently.  “All good things have to be paid for.  But I see—­I realize that you do not consider what I am doing good.  Though it helps other people—­has helped you—­you wonder why, with all the advantages I possess, I should meddle with matters so repugnant to a woman’s natural instincts.”

Yes, he wondered.  That was evident from his silence.  Seeing her as she stood there, so quaintly pretty, so feminine in look and manner—­in short, such a flower—­it was but natural that he should marvel at the incongruity she had mentioned.

“It has a strange, odd look,” she admitted, after a moment of troubled hesitation.  “The most considerate person cannot but regard it as a display of egotism or of a most mercenary spirit.  The cheque you sent me for what I was enabled to do for you in Massachusetts (the only one I have ever received which I have been tempted to refuse) shows to what extent you rated my help and my—­my expectations.  Had I been a poor girl struggling for subsistence, this generosity would have warmed my heart as a token of your desire to cut that struggle short.  But taken with your knowledge of my home and its luxuries, it has often made me wonder what you thought.”

“Shall I tell you?”

He had stepped forward at this question and his countenance, hitherto concealed, became visible in the moonlight.  She no longer recognized it.  Transformed by feeling, it shone down upon her, instinct with all that is finest and best in masculine nature.  Was she ready for this revelation of what she had nevertheless dreamed of for many more nights than four?  She did not know, and instinctively drew herself back till it was she who now stood in the semi-obscurity made by the drooping vines.  From this retreat, she faltered forth a very tremulous No, which in another moment was disavowed by a Yes so faint it was little more than a murmur, followed by a still fainter, Tell me.

But he did not seem in any haste to obey, sweetly as her low-toned injunction must have sounded in his ears.  On the contrary, he hesitated to speak, growing paler every minute as he sought to catch a glimpse of her downcast face so tantalizingly hidden from him.  Did she recognize the nature of the feelings which held him back, or was she simply gathering up sufficient courage to plead her own cause?  Whatever her reason, it was she, not he, who presently spoke saying as if no time had elapsed: