She looked down at her watch chain. "I gave it to Mr. Scarlett, he liked it," she said, with a guilty remembrance of Reynold among the brambles. "But you haven't answered me, Mr. Harding." Her pleading was persistent, like a child's. She was childishly intent on the very word she wanted. She remembered how her uncle had laughed as she walked home after that first encounter with young Harding. "And you saw him roll into the ditch--Barbara, the poor fellow must hate you like poison!" No, he must not! It was the _word_ she could not bear, it was only the _word_ she knew. "Nonsense!" he said, moving his head uneasily, "Let bygones be bygones. We can't alter the past. We are going different ways--go yours, and let me go mine in peace." It was a harsh answer, but the frown which accompanied it betrayed irresolution as well as anger. "I can't go so," Barbara pleaded, emboldened by this sign of possible yielding. "I never meant to do any harm. Say you are not angry--only one word--and then I'll go." "I know you will." He laid his lean hands on the arms of his chair, and drew himself up. "Well," he said, "have it your own way--why not? What is it that I am to say?" "Say," she began eagerly, and then checked herself. She would not ask too much. "Say only that you don't hate me," she entreated, fixing her eyes intently on his face. "I love you, Barbara." The girl recoiled, scared at the sudden intensity of meaning in his eyes, and in every line of his wasted figure as he leaned towards her. His hoarse whisper sent a shock through the deadened air of the drab room. Those three words had broken through the frozen silence of a life of repression and self-restraint, in them was distilled all its hoarded fierceness of love and revenge. In uttering them Reynold had uttered himself at last. To Barbara it was as if a flash of fire showed her his passion, such a passion as her gentle soul had never imagined, against the outer darkness of death and his despair. Something choked and frightened her, and seemed to encircle her heart in its coils. It was a revelation which came from within as well as without. She threw out her hands as if he approached her. "_Adrian!_" she cried. Reynold, leaning feebly on the arms of his chair, laughed. "Well," he said, "are you content? I have said it." "Oh," said Barbara, still gazing at him, "I know now--I understand--you _do_ hate me!" "Love you," he repeated. "I think I loved you from the day I saw you first. I dreamed of you at Mitchelhurst--only of you! Mitchelhurst for you, if you would have it so--but you--_you_!" "No!" she cried. "And afterwards you were afraid of me! If it had been any one else! But you shrank from me--you were afraid of me--the only creature in the world I loved! And then that last night when you came to me--how clever of you to discover that I was fighting with something I wanted to keep down! So I was, Barbara!" He paused, but she only looked helplessly into his eyes.