"No; I didn't want to bother you, and----" He looked up to see her face white, and his manner changed. "Don't, child! it's past and over--besides I have a knack of pulling through--I am sorry I mentioned it, now." "What is it?" she asked, in a constrained voice. "I should like to know, if I may?" "My dear! of course you may. Pyæmia; the knife slipped, that was all. The veriest scratch. What a fool I was to mention it!" "Don't say that," she flashed out suddenly. "Don't you know that I like to hear everything--everything----" She paused, and her quick resentment seemed to die down before a keener thought, and she sate silent for a while. "I can scarcely think what it would have meant to me," she went on, half to herself, before she turned her face to him again. "I should have been quite alone in the world then, you know, Tom." "Until you made a home of your own, perhaps," he replied quietly, being, like most men of his temperament, somewhat given to self-torture. "Perhaps; but it would never be the same," she said, as quietly. "It would never seem to be the haven of rest that the thought of your goodness is to me now. Do you know, Tom, that I always hearten myself up by saying that if I am tired I can always ask you to let me rest, and you would, wouldn't you?" As she spoke she stretched out her hand towards him in her favourite gesture of appeal, and both of his, leaving their work, had reached to it eagerly and clasped it close. "Marjory!" he said, a surge of sheer happiness flooding heart and brain with unalloyed content. "Promise me that always--and--and I am satisfied." "Promise what?" she asked, smiling through the sudden tears which brightened her eyes. "That I will come home to rest if I am tired? Of course I shall. What is the use of having you, Tom, the best, the kindest, if I don't make use of you? And I will. I'll come home fast enough, you'll see, if----" She paused to give a wise shake of her head, and then, clasping the hand he had released over the other which lay upon her knee, she looked out absently over the running water at her feet. "I wonder how I shall like it?" she continued. "I wonder if it will be what I have fancied it?" "Probably not," replied her companion, with a quick dread at his heart. For how could it be so? What could this girl's imagining have to do with that world which he knew so well: so well that the finer tissue in him rebelled against the teaching which his very profession forced him to accept as true, at any rate for the majority of men and women. "Probably not," he repeated more quietly, "though that is just the sort of thing it is impossible to predict of a girl who has been brought up as you have. So it must be settled by experience."