"Anything that helps her to express it she seizes on. You helped her--she seized on you. Now all her heart is stirred by this disaster to her husband, the most active person she's ever known absolutely helpless, so now that has seized her. She can't have two things in her mind at once--that's where her troubles come from--she cares for you. You'll always be something to her that no one else can ever be, and oh! it's so much better, so much, much better, than if you'd gone off, made a mess of it all, spoilt all your beautiful ideas of one another." The thrill in her voice made him, even though he was intensely concerned with his own wrongs and losses, consider her. What Lizzie Rand was this? It flung him back, almost against his will, as though he hated to throw over all the ideas he had formed of her, to that first meeting when they had stood at the window and looked out on the grey square and he had called it the Pool. Then he had suspected her of emotion and sentiment; it was afterwards, when he had made her his wise Counsellor and common-sense Adviser, that he had thought of her as unemotional. He felt now that he had been treating her rather badly. He stopped abruptly and looked down at her; there was something in her earnest gaze at him, something rather nervous and hesitating that did not belong at all to the efficient Miss Rand. "It _is_ good of you, Miss Rand, to have come and given me this note. I'm finding it all rather difficult at the moment, as I'm sure you'll understand. I'd better go off somewhere by myself a bit, I think, but it was good of you." He broke off and stared desolately about him. He was not very far from tears, she thought. She too remembered their first meeting. She had found him melodramatic then, a little insincere--Now she knew that she had been wrong. He was sincere as a child is sincere; the world was utterly black, was transcendently bright as it was for a child. She understood him so well--so much better than Rachel. She knew that neither he nor Rachel would ever have had the wisdom to endure that romantic impatience that was in both of them--"They would have been fighting in a week--But I--should know how to deal with him----" The green park and the brooding sky seemed to join in her tenderness--She had never loved him so surely, so unselfishly as she loved him now. "Tell me," he said gruffly. "I wrote to her ... did she tell you anything about that?" "Yes," Lizzie answered--"I don't know what might have happened if he hadn't had the accident.... But as it is, I know she's glad you wrote--She likes to look back on it, but it's on something that died--gone altogether. And it's much, much better so." "To you," he said, "it may be so."