Then his mood changed, and from his stand by the mantel he regarded her with a sort of grim humor. "This surely is the irony of fate," he went on, speaking almost as if in soliloquy, "that I should come to _you_ with tale of love!... Margaret, why don't you taunt me with my weakness--jeer at me--say the biting, scathing things you must want to say? This certainly is your opportunity. It would complete your victory." "There is no victory," she said in a dead tone, "it is all defeat." He was filled with contrition. "Forgive me. I seem to have an infinite capacity for being cruel. And yet,--how can I make you understand that I would give all I hold dear if I could have the right to shield you? How can I expect you to believe-- ... Why, Margaret! even the boy--the boy--has crept into my heart and intrenched himself until I cannot put him out." A faint pink stole over her eyelids and her chin moved just once, but she did not look up. "And you-- ... child, it overmasters me! Every fiber of my being cries out for you! It is so different from a boy's paltry passion." He took a step toward her as though driven by a force beyond control and said in passionate pleading, "Dearest!--let me call you that just once--did you think you could come into my starved life in the close, intimate, even though enforced comradeship of the sick-room, and leave that life just as you found it? Could show me the love and sympathy, the infinite patience and tenderness of the mother--a thing I had never known--and the dignity, the sweetness, the charm of the woman,--did you think that you could thus reveal yourself to me, and then go away and leave me the same man I had been? You never thought of it at all, did you? You were thinking of Philip--always Philip. "But, Margaret, _I_ was human. I thought of you. And while you rocked the child and sang soft cradle songs to him, I listened and dreamed dreams. Let me tell them to you--just once--for their very wildness. I dreamed that this was _our_ home--such a home as I had known in my warped life only in dreams--and that we had made it, you and I; that the song on your lips was a song of joy, and that I had taught it to you; that the light in your eyes was the love-light--not for Philip, but for me; that it was _my_ child upon your breast; that--no, do not trouble to remind me that even in my dreams I was a fool? But--my God! if only I could have had the chance another man might have!" When he spoke again his voice had a different quality, a yearning compassion that had in it something of the maternal.