"Poor boy! poor boy!" she says over softly twice, moving her head up and down with a little compassionate movement. At the pity expressed by her gesture, an unjust and unjustifiable hard anger takes harsh possession of him. "It was a pity you let it go so far," he says austerely; "you must allow me to say that much; but I suppose, in point of fact, the ball once set rolling, it was past your power to stop it." She listens to his philippic, with her head meekly bent. "I did not try," she answers, in a half·whisper; then, after a pause, raising her down-dropped eyes, lit with a blue fire of excitement, almost inspiration, to his, "I said to myself, 'If I have any luck, I shall die before the smash comes;' and I just lived on from day to day. I had not the heart to stop it; I knew it would stop of itself before long; I had never--hardly ever"--correcting herself, as it seems, with a modifying afterthought--"in my life before known what happiness meant; and oh! _oh!_ OH!"--with a groan of deepening intensity at each repeated interjection--"what a big word it is!" _Never--hardly ever--known what happiness meant before!_ Why, surely she was happy at the Moat! and before his mind's eye there rises an image of her in her riotous rosy gaiety; but even as it does, there flashes upon him a comprehension of her speech. It is not the careless merriment of childhood to which she is alluding; it is to _the_ happiness, _par excellence_, of life. If this is the case, why did she correct herself and modify her negative with a "hardly"? A jealous feeling of someone else--someone beside Byng; a jealousy none the less keen for being vague--for not knowing on what object it can lay hold--sharpens his tone as he repeats aloud, and with an accent of interrogation, her qualifying adverb: "_Hardly_ ever, that implies----" But she breaks in hurriedly, as if dreading--and at the same time doubting her own power of baffling--cross-examination upon that subject on whose borders they are continually hovering. "Talking of happiness makes one think of unhappiness, does not it? We both know something about that, do not we?" She pauses, and he sees that she is alluding to his own sorrow, and that her eye is sounding his to see whether he would wish her to approach it more nearly. His eye, in answer, must give but a dubious beam, since he himself is quite unsure of what his wishes on the subject are; and she goes on with the haste and yet unsteadiness of one who is treading on swampy ground, that gives beneath his feet. "We saw it in the papers; I could not believe it at first. It was the last thing I ever expected to happen. I thought of writing to you, but I did not."