Peak rose with a gesture of passionate impatience.

’What is it to me, new world or old?  My world is where you are.  I have no life of my own; I think only of you, live only by you.’

‘If I could help you!’ she replied, with emotion.  ’What can I do —­but be your friend at a distance?  Everything else has become impossible.’

’Impossible for the present—­for a long time to come.  But is there no hope for me?’

She pressed her hands together, and stood before him unable to answer.  ‘Remember,’ he continued, ’that you are almost as much changed in my eyes as I in yours.  I did not imagine that you had moved so far towards freedom of mind.  If my love for you was profound and absorbing, think what it must now have become!  Yours has suffered by my disgrace, but is there no hope of its reviving—­ if I live worthily—­if I——?’

His voice failed.

‘I have said that we can’t be strangers,’ Sidwell murmured brokenly.  ‘Wherever you go, I must hear of you.’

’Everyone about you will detest my name.  You will soon wish to forget my existence.’

’If I know myself, never!—­Oh, try to find your true work!  You have such abilities, powers so much greater than those of ordinary men.  You will always be the same to me, and if ever circumstances’——­

’You would have to give up so much, Sidwell.  And there is little chance of my ever being well-to-do; poverty will always stand between us, if nothing else.’

‘It must be so long before we can think of that.’

’But can I ever see you?—­No, I won’t ask that.  Who knows?  I may have to go too far away.  But I may write to you—­after a time?’

‘I shall live in the hope of good news from you,’ she replied, trying to smile and to speak cheerfully.  ’This will always be my home.  Nothing will be changed.’

‘Then you don’t think of me as irredeemably base?’

‘If I thought you base,’ Sidwell answered, in a low voice, ’I should not now be speaking with you.  It is because I feel and know that you have erred only—­that is what makes it impossible for me to think of your fault as outweighing the good in your nature.’

’The good?  I wonder how you understand that.  What is there good in me?  You don’t mean mere intellect?’

He waited anxiously for what she would say.  A necessity for speaking out his inmost thoughts had arisen with the emotion, scarcely to be called hope, excited by Sidwell’s magnanimity.  Now, or never, he must stand before this woman as his very self, and be convinced that she loved him for his own sake.

‘No, I don’t mean intellect,’ she replied, with hesitation.

’What then?  Tell me of one quality in me strong enough to justify a woman’s love.’

Sidwell dropped her eyes in confusion.

’I can’t analyse your character—­I only know’——­

She became silent.