He unwound his arms gently, and placed the poor sobbing, throbbing girl, half-unresisted, in an arm-chair by the fireplace. Then he drew up a seat for himself very close by her side, took her hand in his, and soothed it gently with his other one. “He’s been cruel to you, Linnet, I can see,” he murmured softly at her ear. “Now, what has led you to this? Tell me all he has done to you.” Thereat, Linnet, holding his hand hard, and looking deep into his eyes, yet crimson for very shame, began in her own tongue the story of their interview. She hid nothing from Will, and extenuated nothing. She told him in full how Joaquin Holmes had brought her Andreas’s letter to Philippina and offered it for sale; how she had refused to buy it, or have anything to do with it; how he had dropped it by accident and she had picked it up before him, intending to restore it to its rightful owner; how a scuffle had ensued, in the midst of which Andreas had unexpectedly entered; how in his wrath at being discovered, he had fairly lost his temper, and provoked her for once to an act of rebellion; and how in his rage at her note he had turned upon her bodily, and inflicted the marks Will could see so plainly now upon her person. Only the question of divorce she never touched on; a certain feminine delicacy made her shrink from alluding to it. Will listened to every word with profound attention, letting her tell her own tale her own way, unquestioned, but stroking her hand from time to time very gently with his own, or smoothing her fiery cheeks with the tips of his fingers in silent sympathy. At last she ceased, and looked hard at Will, inquiringly. “So I’ve come to you, Will,” she said, in her simple way, with childlike confidence; “and, now I’ve come, may I stop with you always? May I never go away again?” Will’s heart beat high. Her loving trust, her perfect self-surrender, could not fail to touch him. Yet he gazed at her ruefully. “My darling,” he said with a burst, belying his words as he spoke by laying her soft head once more in the hollow of his shoulder; “you shouldn’t have come to me. You’ve done very very wrong—very foolishly I mean. I’m the exact last person on earth you should have come to.” Linnet nestled to him close. “But I _love_ you,” she cried, pleadingly. “You’re the only living soul I’d have cared to come to.” “Yes, yes; I know,” Will answered hastily. “I didn’t mean that, of course. You’re mine, mine, mine! Sooner or later, now, you must certainly come to me. But for the present, darling, I mean, it’s so unwise, so foolish. It’ll prejudice your case, if it ever comes to be heard of. We must take you somewhere else—somewhere free from all blame, don’t you see—for the immediate future.”