He saw her as a woman who, for twenty years, had had no love, although in her very nature she had hungered for it; and if she had not been treated with actual cruelty, at least she had been so basely neglected that cruelty was not far away. It was not true to say that during these months he had grown to hate Brandon, but he had come, more and more, to despise and condemn him. The effeminacy in his own nature had from the first both shrunk from and been attracted by the masculinity in Brandon. He could have loved that man, but as the situation had forbidden that, his feeling now was very near to hate. Then, as the weeks had gone by, Mrs. Brandon had made it clear enough to him that Falk was all that she had left to her--not very much to her even there, perhaps, but something to keep her starved heart from dying. And now Falk was gone, gone in the most brutal, callous way. She had no one in the world left to her but himself. The rush of tenderness and longing to be good to her that now overwhelmed him was so strong and so sudden that it was with the utmost difficulty that he had held himself from going to the sofa beside her. She looked so weak there, so helpless, so gentle. "Amy," he said, "I will do anything in the world that is in my power." She was trembling, partly with genuine emotion, partly with cold, partly with the drama of the situation. "No," she said, "I don't want to do a thing that's going to involve you. You must be left out of this. It is something that I must carry through by myself. It was wrong of me, I suppose, to come to you, but my first thought was that I must have companionship. I was selfish----" "No," he broke in, "you were not selfish. I am prouder that you came to me than I can possibly say. That is what I'm here for. I'm your friend. You know, after all these months, that I am. And what is a friend for?" Then, as though he felt that he was advancing too dangerously close to emotion, he went on more quietly: "Tell me--if it isn't impertinent of me to ask--what is your husband doing about it?" "Doing? Nothing." "Nothing?" "No. I thought that he would go up to London and see Falk, but he doesn't feel that that is necessary. He says that, as Falk has run away with the girl, the most decent thing that he can do is to marry her. He seems very little upset by it. He is a most curious man. After all these years, I don't understand him at all." Morris went on hesitatingly. "I feel guilty myself. Weeks ago I overheard gossip about your son and some girl. I wondered then whether I ought to say something to you. But it's so difficult in these cases to know what one ought to do. There's so much gossip in these little Cathedral towns. I thought about it a good deal. Finally, I decided that it wasn't my place to meddle."