As he uttered a violent expression of dissent, she went on: "It's quite true, Oliver, and what is more, of the two she likes Godfrey the best. Why shouldn't she? She thinks I've behaved very unkindly to Godfrey. The only excuse she can make for me--she told me so once, long ago--is that I'm inhuman. I suppose in a way I _am_ inhuman?" She looked at him plaintively, a strange, piteous expression in her beautiful, shadowed eyes. And Oliver Tropenell caught his breath. God--how he loved her! Her inhumanity--to use that cruelly misleading term which she had just used herself--only made his passion burn with a purer, whiter flame. The one thing in the world that mattered to him now was this woman's deliverance from the awful death-in-life to which her sensitive conscience, and her moving love for her child, alone condemned her. Yes, Laura's deliverance was the only thing worth compassing--and that even if the deliverer were wrecked, soul as well as body, body as well as soul, in the process. They began walking again, slowly, slowly, once more enwrapped in a silence which said so much more than words could have said, even to Laura's still numb, unawakened heart. It was she who at last broke the kind of spell which lay on them both. They had come almost to the end of the broad path. Opposite to where they were standing, on the other side of the road, was a huge white and green building, handsome and showy, looking strangely un-English and out of place in the famous old London way. "They pulled down such a wonderful, delightful house just there," she said regretfully. "I was once taken to it by my father, when I was quite a little girl. It was like going right back a hundred years--not only to another London, but to another England. It's a shame that any one should have been allowed to pull down such a bit of old London as that." And Oliver agreed, absently. So, talking of indifferent things, they walked back to the hotel where Mrs. Tropenell was awaiting them, and the three afterwards spent the rest of the day peacefully together. But the next day there began again for them all the same dreary round--that odd, artificial life of "having a good time," as Gillie jovially put it. Somehow Laura did not mind it so much now as she had done before. Her talk with Oliver had shifted her burden a little, and made her feel as if he and she had gone back to their old, happy, simple friendship. It had also deadened her feeling of acute, unreasoning anger with Godfrey. At last came the morning when Oliver and Gillie were to go to Paris. And at the last moment, standing on the platform at Charing Cross, there took place a rather pathetic, ridiculous little scene. Gillie had bought for his sister a beautiful old jewel, and he thrust it--with a merry little word as to this being the first really nice present he had ever given her--into her hand. When she opened the case and saw the emerald and pearl heart, her eyes brimmed over with tears.