"And you told me you had done nothing for me," she said, in the same passionate low voice--"that day--when you had just done everything--what nobody else in the wide world would ever have done for me! And you were--hurt, too...." She stopped, abruptly. Her face quivered, just perceptibly, but he saw it. Strange and incalculable.... Surely he had tried to do bigger and better things for Mary, than the impromptu display of his primitive passion.... Was this, also, of the primal and everlasting; did this, too, touch the immutable and true? The helper was making reply, not exactly with _insouciance_: "Why!--why, but I can't let you think of it--it was _nothing_! I _enjoyed_ it! I simply didn't think he had behaved to you as he should. Naturally, I didn't like that...." "_You_ didn't--because that's the way you are. You expect nothing--but give everything. I don't like to hear you make light of yourself. I don't." She turned away, went over to her desk by the window, where the school examination-books awaited her. But once more it was clear that she had no purpose here. She moved the piled books on the desk-leaf, half an inch, perhaps, and went on in a controlled voice:-- "But I can't tell you how I felt, and feel, about it. And it's foolish to--try to say thank you. We must talk of something else.... Sit down, won't you? I'll give you some light in a minute." But the young man in the wedding raiment did not sit down, gave no sign at all that he had heard her conclusive and hortatory speech. His eyes, turning, had followed her as she went away from him. And now, as she ended, he only stood and looked; looked over the familiar room at the slender figure of a woman which, all so suddenly, had shot up to fill the world for him. Fading light from the Green Park just touched Mary's face, where she stood. She was a school-teacher, thirty years old. Life had buffeted her: hard contacts with the real world had left upon her their permanent marks, traced lines not to be eradicated beside these fine eyes. This woman's first youth, her April bloom, was gone forever. But to this man on the hearthside, her presence, her nearness, were charged now with an intense power over depths in him which would stir to no fleshly prettiness. He had her secret now. He knew her, a Woman revealed. And, standing and looking at her over the darkening room, he was mysteriously shaken with a profound emotion.