He went on to tell her, with even greater fulness than he had told the doctor. She listened with the interest women take in anything weird, and with a compassion for him which she did not conceal so perfectly but that he saw it. At the end he said: "You may wonder that I come to you with all this, which must sound like the ravings of a madman." "No--no," she hesitated. "I came because I wished you to know everything about me before--before--I wouldn't have come, you'll believe me, if I hadn't had the doctor's assurance that my trouble was merely a part of my being physically out of kilter, and had nothing to do with my sanity--Good Heavens! What am I saying? But the thought has tormented me so! And in the midst of it I've allowed myself to--Mrs. Yarrow, I love you. Don't you know that?" Alford may have had a divided mind in this declaration, but after that one word Mrs. Yarrow had no mind for anything else. He went on. "I'm not only sick--so sick that I sha'n't be able to do any work for a year at least--but I'm poor, so poor that I can't afford to be sick." She lifted her eyes and looked at him, where she sat oddly aloof from those possessions of hers, to which she seemed so little related, and said, with a smile quivering at the corners of her pretty mouth, "I don't see what that has to do with it." "What do you mean?" He stared at her hard. "Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?" "No, you're only one, and there's none like you! I could never see any one else while I looked at you!" he cried, only half aware of his poetry, and meaning what he said very literally. But she took only the poetry. "I shouldn't wish you to," she said, and she laughed. He could not believe yet in his good-fortune. His countenance fell. "I'm afraid I don't understand, or that you don't. It doesn't seem as if I could get to the end of my unworthiness, which isn't voluntary. It seems altogether too base. I can't let you say what you do, if you mean it, till you know that I come to you in despair as well as in love. You saved me from the fear I was in, again and again, and I believe that without you I shall--Ah, it seems very base! But the doctor--If I could always tell some one--if I could tell _you_ when these things were obsessing me--haunting me--they would cease--" Mrs. Yarrow rose, with rather a piteous smile. "Then, I am a prescription!" She hoped, woman-like, that she was solely a passion; but is any woman worth having, ever solely a passion? "Don't!" Alford implored, rising too. "Don't, in mercy, take it that way! It's only that I wish you to know everything that's in me; to know how utterly helpless and worthless I am. You needn't have a pang in throwing such a thing away." She put out her hand to him, but at arm's-length. "I sha'n't throw you away--at least, not to-night. I want to think." It was a way of saying she wished him to go, and he had no desire to stay. He asked if he might come again, and she said, "Oh yes." "To-morrow?"