She was suddenly stricken.  Not since she had been a child, not even in the weeks just passed, had she felt that pain.  And as a child, self-pity seized her—­as a lost child, when darkness is setting in, and the will fails and distance appalls.  Scalding tears welled into her eyes as she seized the frame of the door, but it must have been her breathing that he heard.  He turned and crossed the room to her as she had known he would, and she clung to him as she had so often done in days gone by when, hurt and bruised, he had rescued and soothed her.  For the moment, the delusion that his power was still limitless prevailed, and her faith whole again, so many times had he mended a world all awry.

He led her to the window-seat and gently disengaged her hands from his shoulders and took one of them and held it between his own.  He did not speak, for his was a rare intuition; and gradually her hand ceased to tremble, and the uncontrollable sobs that shook her became less frequent.

“Why did you come?  Why did you come?” she cried.

“To see you, Honora.”

“But you might have—­warned me.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s true, I might.”

She drew her hand away, and gazed steadfastly at his face.

“Why aren’t you angry?” she said.  “You don’t believe in what I have done—­you don’t sympathize with it—­you don’t understand it.”

“I have come here to try,” he said.

She shook her head.

“You can’t—­you can’t—­you never could.”

“Perhaps,” he answered, “it may not be so difficult as you think.”

Grown calmer, she considered this.  What did he mean by it? to imply a knowledge of herself?

“It will be useless,” she said inconsequently.

“No,” he said, “it will not be useless.”

She considered this also, and took the broader meaning that such acts are not wasted.

“What do you intend to try to do?” she asked.

He smiled a little.

“To listen to as much as you care to tell me, Honora.”

She looked at him again, and an errant thought slipped in between her larger anxieties.  Wherever he went, how extraordinarily he seemed to harmonize with his surroundings.  At Silverdale, and in the drawing-room of the New York house, and in the little parlour in this far western town.  What was it?  His permanence?  Was it his power?  She felt that, but it was a strange kind of power—­not like other men’s.  She felt, as she sat there beside him, that his was a power more difficult to combat.  That to defeat it was at once to make it stronger, and to grow weaker.  She summoned her pride, she summoned her wrongs:  she summoned the ego which had winged its triumphant flight far above his kindly, disapproving eye.  He had the ability to make her taste defeat in the very hour of victory.  And she knew that, when she fell, he would be there in his strength to lift her up.

“Did—­did they tell you to come?” she asked.