He was looking at her with those shy, worshipping eyes of his that always made her marvel at her own wonderfulness. “It doesn’t nourish you, dearie,” complained Mary. “You could have bought yourself a nice bit of meat with the same money.”!

“I suppose she’s satisfied herself that he’s brainy,” she laughed. “I met her pretty often during those months that Helen Lavery was running her round,” she said at length. “It always seemed to me to have a touch of the heroic, that absurd effort she was making to ‘qualify’ herself, so that she might be of use to him. I can see her doing something quite big, if she thought it would help him.”

She had gone down to Liverpool, intending to persuade her father to leave the control of the works to Arthur, and to come and live with her in London; but had left without broaching the subject. There were nights when she would trapse the streets till she would almost fall exhausted, rather than face the solitude awaiting her in her own rooms. But so also there were moods when, like some stricken animal, her instinct was to shun all living things. At such times his presence, for all his loving patience, would have been as a knife in her wound. Besides, he would always be there, when escape from herself for a while became an absolute necessity. More and more she had come to regard him as her comforter. Not from anything he ever said or did. Rather, it seemed to her, because that with him she felt no need of words. “I’m so awfully sorry,” he said. “I’ve been talking to you as if you were a public meeting. I’m afraid I’m more used to them than I am to women. Please forgive me.” “I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know. She taught it to me in those months. I might have learned more if I had let her go on teaching. It was the only way she knew.”