The fingers that he held tightened a little on his own. Now she thought he would tell her that he had given his problem the test of bold reflection and could come to her with his mind made up--and the decision was that he needed her. In the hope her loneliness saw an opening vista of happiness, but his next words were not of that. "You have read the papers?" he questioned. "You know what has happened?" Of course she knew and her heart had been full of grief for him in these days of distress. Had she not written him--and torn up unmailed--a score of letters in which she had told him tenderly and unreservedly all she felt? But when she had seen him tonight she had forgotten that, remembering only that he had searched for her and found her and come to her. Now that he spoke of misfortune to himself and his family she wanted to give him only sympathy and comfort and love--yet coming like a sudden, chilling draught, a conviction struck in upon her heart and left it shuddering--with all its tender new hopes shattered. For as he spoke she realized with the finality of revelation that the Paul Burton of whom she thought in her dreams had not come at all; only the Paul Burton who, too weak to bear his own sorrows, came to share them with her. He had not come offering her strength and companionship in loneliness--but asking them for himself. He had not come to offer marriage. She had, in the face of the old warnings, dreamed again--falsely idealized once more--and his mission was to waken in her anew the dreary reality of her life. Yet that same maternal instinct which made her love a thing more of giving than of asking endowed him with a greater dearness, as she realized the truth. "Yes, dear," she said in a low voice, "I know--and I've been thinking of you all the while." Then for a quarter of an hour he recited his griefs and forgot hers. She was there near him; his arms were about her and she was comforting him. That, for him, was all that was necessary. But at the end of it all she rose and turned half from him and her face was pale. "If there was a single thing I could do," she said from her heart, "I would do it at any cost--" Her voice questioned him tensely. "You know that, don't you, dear? You believe it." "You are doing something now," he declared. "You are giving me your own strength." To herself she said bitterly that to make a mistake once is an accident with which life may ambush the most wary, but to walk twice into the same snare stamps the victim as a fool. She was paying the price now of that folly. She was indeed giving him, as he enthusiastically declared, her own strength for his adversities, and he was accepting it, using it, burning it up with no thought of how little of that particular capital she had to squander in the sharing.