"But I must not tire myself out before I have said what I want to say to you," he continues, his embarrassment perceptibly deepening, while his transparent hand fidgets uneasily with the border of the coverlet thrown over him, "or"--laughing again--"I shall have that tyrant of a nurse down upon me, and--and I do wish--I have wished so much--so unspeakably--to see you, to speak to you." She sits immovable, listening, while a ray of something--can it be hope? why should it be hope?--darts across her heart. After all, this may be Byng--her Byng; this strange new manner may be only the garment in which sickness has dressed his passion--a worn-out garment soon to drop away from him in rags and tatters, and in which cannot she already discern the first rent? After all, she may have need for her armour--that armour which, so far, has seemed so pitifully needless. "I knew that it would be no use asking leave to send for you any sooner; they would have told me I was not up to it--would have put me off with some excuse; so I kept a 'still sough.' Do you know that I never mentioned your name until to-day? But it has been hard work, I can tell you; for the last two days I have scarcely been able to bear it, I have so _hungered_ to see you." Her eyelids tremble, and she instinctively puts up her hand to cover her tell-tale mouth. Surely this is the old language. Surely there is, at all events, a snatch of it in his last words; and again that prick of illogical joy quickens the beats of her fainting heart, though she tries to chide it away, asking herself why she should be in any measure glad that the love which she has come here for no other purpose than to renounce, still lives and stirs. "You may think I am exaggerating, but in point of fact I cannot by any expression less strong than the gnaw of downright hunger convey the longing I have had to see you." He pauses with a momentary failure of his still feeble powers. She catches her breath. Now is the time for her to strike in, to arrest him before he has time to say anything more definite. Now is the time for her to fulfil her promise, her inhuman promise, which yet never for one instant strikes her as anything but irrevocably binding. Does he see her intention, that he plunges, in order to anticipate it, into so hurried a resumption of his interrupted sentence? "To see you, in order to beg--to supplicate you to forgive me for my conduct to you." She gives an almost imperceptible start. This ending is not what she had expected, not the one to defend herself against which she has been fastening on her buckler and grasping her shield. The words that it demands in answer are not those with which she has been furnishing herself, and it is a moment or two before she can supply herself with others. He must be referring, of course, to his last meeting with her--that one so violently broken off by the catastrophe of his collapse.