“I do not say that.  I cannot tell——­”

The words were very low; she was too truthful to conceal from him what half dawned on herself—­the possibility that, more in his presence and under different circumstances, she might feel her heart go to him with a warmer and a softer impulse than that of friendship.  The heroism of his life had moved her greatly.

His head dropped down again upon his arms.

“O God!  It is possible, at least!  I am blind—­mad.  Make my choice for me!  I know not what to do.”

The tears that had gathered in her eyes fell slowly down over her colorless cheeks; she looked at him with a pity that made her heart ache with a sorrow only less than his own.  The grief was for him chiefly; yet something of it for herself.  Some sense of present bitterness that fell on her from his fate, some foreboding of future regret that would inevitably and forever follow her when she left him to his loneliness and his misery, smote on her with a weightier pang than any her caressed and cloudless existence had encountered.  Love was dimly before her as the possibility he called it; remote, unrealized, still unacknowledged, but possible under certain conditions, only known as such when it was also impossible through circumstances.

He had suffered silently; endured strongly; fought greatly; these were the only means through which any man could have ever reached her sympathy, her respect, her tenderness.  Yet, though a very noble and a very generous woman, she was also a woman of the world.  She knew that it was not for her to say even thus much to a man who was in one sense well-nigh a stranger, and who stood under the accusation of a crime whose shadow he allowed to rest on him unmoved.  She felt sick at heart; she longed unutterably, with a warmer longing than had moved her previously, to bid him, at all cost, lay bare his past, and throw off the imputed shame that lay on him.  Yet all the grand traditions of her race forbade her to counsel the acceptance of an escape whose way led through a forfeiture of honor.

“Choose for me, Venetia!” he muttered at last once more.

She rose with what was almost a gesture of despair, and thrust the gold hair off her temples.

“Heaven help me, I cannot—­I dare not!  And—­I am no longer capable of being just!”

There was an accent almost of passion in her voice; she felt that so greatly did she desire his deliverance, his justification, his return to all which was his own—­desired even his presence among them in her own world—­that she could no longer give him calm and unbiased judgment.  He heard, and the burning tide of a new joy rushed on him, checked almost ere it was known, by the dread lest for her sake she should ever give him so much pity that such pity became love.

He started to his feet and looked down imploringly into her eyes—­a look under which her own never quailed or drooped, but which they answered with that same regard which she had given him when she had declared her faith in his innocence.