He would have disengaged his hand, but she clutched it firmly now. “Randal!” she cried sharply, desperately driven to woo this man who would not woo her despite her clear invitation. In gentle, sorrowing rebuke she added: “Can you, then, really think of leaving me again?” His face assumed the pallor of death, and his limbs trembled under him. “What else is possible?” he asked her miserably. “That is a question you had best answer for yourself.” “What answer can I supply?” He looked at her, almost fearfully, with those grey eyes that were normally so steady and could be so hard and arrogant. He moistened his lips before resuming. “Should I allow you to gather up these poor shards of my broken life with the hands of pity?” “Pity?” she cried in repudiation. Then, shaking her head a little; “And what if it were so?” she asked. “What then? Oh, Randal, if I have pity for you, have you then none for me?” “Pity for you! I thank God you do not stand in need of pity.” “Do I not? What else but pitiful can you account my state? I have waited years, with what patience and fortitude I could command, for one to whom I deemed myself to belong, and when at last he arrived, it is only to reject me.” He laughed at that, but without any trace of mirth. “Nay, nay,” he said. “I am not so easily deceived by your charitable pretence. Confess that out of your pity you but act a part.” “I see. You think that, having been an actress once, I must be acting ever. Will you believe me, I wonder, when I swear to you that, in all those years of weary waiting, I withstood every temptation that besets my kind, keeping myself spotless against your coming? Will you believe that? And if you believe it, will you cheat me now?” “Believe it! O God! If I did not, perhaps I could now yield more easily. The gulf between us would be less wide.” “There is no gulf between us, Randal. It has been bridged and bridged again.” He disengaged his hand from her clasp at last. “Oh, why do you try me, Nan?” he cried out, like a man in pain. “God knows you cannot need me. What have I to offer--I that am as bankrupt of fortune as of honour?” “Do women love men for what they bring?” she asked him. “Is that the lesson a mercenary’s life has taught you? Oh, Randal, you spoke of Chance and how it had directed all your life, and yet it seems you have not learnt to read its signs. A world lay between us in which we were lost to each other. Yet Chance brought us together again, and if the way of it was evil, yet it was the way of Chance. Again we strayed apart. You went from me driven by shame and wounded pride--yes, pride, Randal--intending the separation to be irrevocable. And again we have come together. Will you weary Chance by demanding that it perform this miracle for a third time?” He looked at her steadily now, a man redeemed, driven back into the hard ways of honour by the scourge of all that had befallen him.