Again that little assenting movement of her fair head. How perfectly comprehensible he still is! How well she understands that he is renouncing her among the other follies of his "salad days"--college bear-fights, music-halls, gambling clubs. Well, why should not he? Has not she come here on purpose to renounce him? Can she quarrel with him for having saved her the trouble? "And I thought that I could not begin better than by falling on my knees to you. I wish I could fall on my real knees to you!"--with a momentary expression of extreme impatience at his own bodily weakness--"and ask you most humbly and tenderly and reverently to pardon me." She looks at him, and sees his wasted face flushing with fatigue and worry and mental suffering. Oh, what a bitter wave of desolateness rolls over her! But she smiles. "I still do not understand what I am to forgive you for. I suppose that you could no more help having once thought you loved me, than you can help"--she stops abruptly in compassion for the look of acute regret, shame and remorse that crosses his sharp features, and, in her mercy to him, gives a different close to her phrase from that which its beginning had seemed to bespeak--"than you can help having been so ill." Her tone, quite unconsciously to herself is inexpressibly touching; and Byng, weakened by illness, turns his face upon the pillow, and breaks into violent weeping. His mother had cried too. It seems to be in the family. She has risen--what further is there for her to stay for?--and pauses quietly at his side till the paroxysm is past. Her standing posture tells him that she is going, and he consequently struggles to recover himself in some degree; but having never cultivated self-control when he was in health, it declines to come at his enfeebled bidding now. "Forgive me! forgive me!" is all he can stammer. She looks down upon him with a strange and tender smile, in which for the moment the selfless, pitying sweetness has swallowed up the misery. "Which am I to forgive you for--for having loved me? or for having ceased to love me? For having been mad? or for being sane? Yes, of course I forgive you from the very bottom of my heart! God bless you! Make haste and get well!" She walks cheerfully to the door, and, reaching it, turns, still wearing that smile, that he may see how perfectly friendly is her last look; but he does not see it. He has rolled over on his face, and the whole sofa is shaking with his sobs. CHAPTER XIII. "The pity of it, Iago! The pity of it!"