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His arm went out to her again. 'Poor little thing! I'm afraid I can never understand all that your childhood was; only pity. But what you say does not tend to make me pity—these people. Quite the contrary.'

In an instant, while he sat there unmoving, unchanged in aspect, a flame of rage had wrapped him as a tree may be robed in fire, leaving him for the moment gripped helpless and listening only half-consciously to her words.

'You shouldn't pity me,' she murmured, and continued, 'It must have been that, perhaps, rather than my rational intelligence, which taught me to be cold to both of them. Perhaps if any love for either of them had been left afterward my heart should have been broken. As it is——' She laughed bitterly.

'You know that as it is I am heartless.' Yet this speech and the eyes with which she looked at him as she said it made Richard Milne wonder and hope. Clearly there had been a change, and she must have learned in his absence to admit to herself whether or not she loved him. The thought was enough: with mounting surety he felt that she did love him, that this was the time appointed—that surely he and Ada Lethen would not let go the chance of happiness without a struggle. If only it were just a matter of duty. But it was not. For so much of her life she had been bound to this place and to these slowly petrifying people that she could not imagine herself apart from them.