She held her hand to him, but Peak drew away, his face averted.

‘How can you give me the pain of refusing such an offer?’ he exclaimed, with remonstrance which was all but anger.  ’You know the thing is utterly impossible.  I should be ridiculous if I argued about it for a moment.’

‘I can’t see that it is impossible.’

’Then you must take my word for it.  But I have no right to speak to you in that way,’ he added, more kindly, seeing the profound humiliation which fell upon her.  ’You meant to come to my aid at a time when I seemed to you lonely and miserable.  It was a generous impulse, and I do indeed thank you.  I shall always remember it and be grateful to you.’

Marcella’s face was again in shadow.  Its lineaments hardened to an expression of cold, stern dignity.

‘I have made a mistake,’ she said.  ’I thought you above common ways of thinking.’

‘Yes, you put me on too high a pedestal,’ Peak answered, trying to speak humorously.  ’One of my faults is that I am apt to mistake my own position in the same way.’

’You think yourself ambitious.  Oh, if you knew really great ambition!  Go back to your laboratory, and work for wages.  I would have saved you from that.’

The tone was not vehement, but the words bit all the deeper for their unimpassioned accent.  Godwin could make no reply.

‘I hope,’ she continued, ’we may meet a few years hence.  By that time you will have learnt that what I offered was not impossible.  You will wish you had dared to accept it.  I know what your ambition is.  Wait till you are old enough to see it in its true light.  How you will scorn yourself!  Surely there was never a man who united such capacity for great things with so mean an ideal.  You will never win even the paltry satisfaction on which you have set your mind—­never!  But you can’t be made to understand that.  You will throw away all the best part of your life.  Meet me in a few years, and tell me the story of the interval.’

‘I will engage to do that, Marcella.’

’You will?  But not to tell me the truth.  You will not dare to tell the truth.’

‘Why not?’ he asked, indifferently.  ’Decidedly I shall owe it you in return for your frankness to-day.  Till then—­good-bye.’

She did not refuse her hand, and as he moved away she watched him with a smile of slighting good-nature.

On the morrow Godwin was back in Bristol, and there he dwelt for another six months, a period of mental and physical lassitude.  Earwaker corresponded with him, and urged him to attempt the work that had been proposed, but such effort was beyond his power.

He saw one day in a literary paper an announcement that Reusch’s Bibel und Natur was about to be published in an English translation.  So someone else had successfully finished the work he undertook nearly two years ago.  He amused himself with the thought that he could ever have persevered so long in such profitless labour, and with a contemptuous laugh he muttered ‘Thohu wabohu.’