"You know what man he was," said the Doctor, with a natural thrill of pleasure that he could say it honestly. "I know, poor child! A vapid, cruel tyrant, weak, foul. You hated him, Grey? There's a strength of hatred in your blood. Answer me. You dare speak truth to me." "He's dead now,"--with a long, choking breath. "We will not speak of him." She stood a moment, looking down the stretch of curdling black water,--then, turning with a sudden gesture, as though she flung something from her, looked at him with a pitiful effort to smile. "I don't often think of that time. I cannot bear pain very well. I like to be happy. When I'm busy now, or playing with little Pen, I hardly believe I am the woman who was John Gurney's wife. I was so old then! I was like a hard, tigerish soul, tried and tempted day by day. He made me that." She could not bear pain, he saw: remembrance of it, alone, made the flesh about her lips blue, unsteadied her brain; the well-accented face grew vacant, dreary; neither nerves nor will of this woman were tough. Her family were not the stuff out of which voluntary heroes are made. He saw, too, she was thrusting it back,--out of thought: it was her temperament to do that. "So, now, Grey," he said, cheerfully, "the story's told. Shall we lay that ghost of the old life, and see what these healthful new years have for us?" Paul Blecker's voice was never so strong or pure: whatever of coarseness had clung to him fell off then, as he came nearer to the weak woman whom God had given to him to care for; whatever of latent manhood, of chivalry, slept beneath, some day to make him an earnest husband and father, and helpful servant of the True Man, came out in his eager face and eye, now. He took her two hands in his: how strong his muscles were! how the man's full pulse throbbed healthfully against her own! She looked up with a sudden blush and smile. A minute ago she thought herself so strong to renounce! She meant, this weak, incomplete woman, to keep to the shame of that foul old lie of hers, accepting that as her portion for life. There is a chance comes to some few women, once in their lives, to escape into the full development of their natures by contact with the one soul made in the same mould as their own. It came to this woman to-night. Grey was no theorist about it: all that she knew was, that, when Paul Blecker stood near her, for the first time in her life she was not alone,--that, when he spoke, his words were but more forcible utterances of her own thought,--that, when she thought of leaving him, it was like drawing the soul from her living body, to leave it pulseless, dead. Yet she would do it. "I am not fit to be any man's wife. If you had come to me when I was a child, it might have been,--it ought to have been,"--with an effort to draw her hands from him. Blecker only smiled, and seated her gently on the mossy boll of the beech-tree. "Stay. Listen to me," he whispered.