He turned. What a vision! His artistic sense absorbed it in an instant--the beautiful tremulous lip, the drawn white brow. For a moment he drank in the pity, the emotion of those eyes. Then a movement of such self-scorn as even he had never felt swept through him. He gently moved away; her hand dropped. ‘Miss Leyburn,’ he said, gazing at her, his olive face singularly pale, ‘don’t waste your pity on me, for Heaven’s sake. Some madness made me behave as I did just now. Years ago the same sort of idiocy betrayed me to your brother; never before or since. I ask your pardon, humbly,’ and his tone seemed to scorch her, ‘that this second fit of ranting should have seized me in your presence.’ But he could not keep it up. The inner upheaval had gone too far. He stopped and looked at her--piteously, the features quivering. It was as though the man’s whole nature had for the moment broken up, become disorganized. She could not bear it. Some ghastly infirmity seemed to have been laid bare to her. She held out both her hands. Swiftly he caught them, stooped, kissed them, let them go. It was an extraordinary scene--to both a kind of lifetime. Then he gathered himself together by a mighty effort. ‘That was _adorable_ of you,’ he said with a long breath. ‘But I stole it--I despise myself. Why should you pity me? What is there to pity me for? My troubles, such as I have, are my own making--every one.’ And he laid a sort of vindictive emphasis on the words. The tears of excitement were in her eyes. ‘Won’t you let me be your friend?’ she said, trembling, with a kind of reproach. ‘I thought--the other night--we were to be friends. Won’t you tell me--’ ‘--more of yourself?’ her eyes said, but her voice failed her. And as for him, as he gazed at her, all the accidents of circumstance, of individual character, seemed to drop from her. He forgot the difference of years; he saw her no longer as she was--a girl hardly out of the schoolroom, vain, ambitious, dangerously responsive, on whose crude romantic sense he was wantonly playing; she was to him pure beauty, pure woman. For one tumultuous moment the cold, critical instinct which had been for years draining his life of all its natural energies was powerless. It was sweet to yield, to speak, as it had never been sweet before.