"Are they chiefly strangers--or--or do you ever see any one you've--you've seen before?" His difficulty in phrasing this question made me even more sorry for him than I was already. I decided, both for his sake and my own, to walk up frankly and take the bull by the horns. "They're generally strangers; but sometimes people come whom I know." I looked at him steadily as I continued. "I'll tell you something, sir. Perhaps I ought not to, and it may be betraying a secret; but you might as well know it from me as hear it from some one else." The expression of the face he turned on me was so much that of Jove, whose look could strike a man dead, that I had all I could do to go on. "Mrs. Brokenshire comes to see me." "To see--you?" "Yes, sir, to see me." The staccato accent grew difficult and thick. "What for?" "Because she can't help it. She's sorry for me." There was a new attempt to ignore me and my troubles as he said: "Why should she be sorry for you?" "Because she sees that you're hard on me--" "I haven't meant to be hard on you, only just." "Well, just then; but Mrs. Brokenshire doesn't know anything about justice when she can be merciful. You must know that yourself, sir. I think she's the most beautiful woman God ever made; and she's as kind as she's beautiful. I'll tell you something else, sir. It will be another betrayal, but it will show you what she is. One day at Newport--after you'd spoken to me--and she saw that I was so crushed by it that all I could do was to creep down among the rocks and cry--she watched me, and followed me, and came and cried with me. And so when she heard I was here--" "Who told her?" There was a measure of accusation in the tone of the question, but I pretended not to detect it. "Mrs. Rossiter, perhaps--she knows--or almost anybody. I never asked her." "Very well! What then?" "I was only going to say that when she heard I was here she came almost at once. I begged her not to--" "Why? What were you afraid of?" "I knew you wouldn't like it. But I couldn't stop her. No one could stop her when it comes to her doing an act of kindness. She obeys her own nature because she can't do anything else. She's like a little bird that you can keep from flying by holding it in your hand, but as soon as your grasp is relaxed--it flies." Something of this was true, in that it was true potentially. She had these qualities, even if they were nipped in her as buds are nipped in a backward spring. I could only calm my conscience as I went along by saying to myself that if I saved her she would have to bear me out through being true to the picture I was painting, and living up to her real self. Praise of the woman he adored would have been as music to him had he not had something on his mind that turned music into poignancy. What it was I could surmise, and so be prepared for it. Not till he had been some time silent, probably getting his question into the right words, did he say: