There was silence.

‘You do feel much better, I hope?’ fell from Sidney’s lips.

’Much stronger.  It’s only my mind; everything is so dark to me.  You know how little patience I always had.  It was enough if any one said, ‘You must do this,’ or ’You must put up with that’—­at once I resisted.  It was my nature; I couldn’t bear the feeling of control.  That’s what I’ve had to struggle with since I recovered from my delirium at the hospital, and hadn’t even the hope of dying.  Can you put yourself in my place, and imagine what I have suffered?’

Sidney was silent.  His own life had not been without its passionate miseries, but the modulations of this voice which had no light of countenance to aid it raised him above the plane of common experience and made actual to him the feelings he knew only in romantic story.  He could not stir, lest the slightest sound should jar on her speaking.  His breath rose visibly upon the chill air, but the discomfort of the room was as indifferent to him as to his companion.  Clara rose, as it impelled by mental anguish; she stretched out her band to the mantel-piece, and so stood, between him and the light, her admirable figure designed on a glimmering background.

‘I know why you say nothing,’ she continued, abruptly but without resentment.  ’You cannot use words of sympathy which would be anything but formal, and you prefer to let me understand that.  It is like you.  Oh, you mustn’t think I mean the phrase as a reproach.  Anything but that.  I mean that you were always honest, and time hasn’t changed you—­in that.’  A slight, very slight, tremor on the close.  ’I’d rather you behaved to me like your old self.  A sham sympathy would drive me mad.’

‘I said nothing,’ he replied, ’only because words seemed meaningless.’

’Not only that.  You feel for me, I know, because you are not heartless; but at the same time you obey your reason, which tells you that all I suffer comes of my own self-will.’

’I should like you to think better of me than that.  I’m not one of those people, I hope, who use every accident to point a moral, and begin by inventing the moral to suit their own convictions.  I know all the details of your misfortune.’

‘Oh, wasn’t it cruel that she should take such revenge upon me!’ Her voice rose in unrestrained emotion.  ’Just because she envied me that poor bit of advantage over her!  How could I be expected to refuse the chance that was offered?  It would have been no use; she couldn’t have kept the part.  And I was so near success.  I had never had a chance of showing what I could do.  It wasn’t much of a part, really, but it was the lead, at all events, and it would have made people pay attention to me.  You don’t know how strongly I was always drawn to the stage; there I found the work for which I was meant.  And I strove so hard to make my way.  I had no friends, no money.  I earned only just enough to supply my needs.  I know what people think about actresses.  Mr. Kirkwood, do you imagine I have been living at my ease, congratulating myself that I had escaped from all hardships?’