He did not turn, because he was afraid to let even a vacant mirror like Our Agnes reflect his face; and also for another reason. The fragrance of Harriet’s galloping soup reached him quickly across the room, waking him to the violent realisation that he had not tasted food for many hours. If he saw it, he might be driven to a fierce snatching which would send Our Agnes to join Helwise in her orgy of hysterics upstairs; so he stood fast, clasping the paper like a child in peril. “Will you put it down--whatever it is?” The tray touched the table. “Thanks! And, while you’re here, do you mind lighting the fire? I couldn’t find any matches.” He sat down in the desk-chair, struggling with his consuming hunger, and cursing himself for having kept her a moment longer than was necessary. She would take hours to light the fire--she always did--and he would have to sit in torture until she had finished. But he was very cold, chill with hunger as well as damp, and the mere consciousness of a woman’s presence had roused the weary man’s instinctive claim for help. Perhaps she would not find the matches, either, and while she went for others he could retreat in dignity with the food. But she did find them. He heard them rattle as she drew them out from behind the clock. Why on earth hadn’t he thought of looking there himself? It wasn’t like Our Agnes to be so quickwitted. Now he would have to sit through an eternity of craving while she fumbled with the wet sticks. He fixed his eyes furtively on the paper, and was back again sharply in his former atmosphere of longing and regret. Dandy, on her knees, fighting the unwilling sticks, fought also the strangling tears and pitiful laughter in her own heart. Harriet’s jest was become fact; he had indeed taken her for Our Agnes! Her voice had sounded strange even in her own ears--she admitted that; but, if she had ever had a real place in his life, ever stirred, if only for an instant, his difficult heart, ever been to him even a fraction of more worth than the slattern in his kitchen, would he not have known that there was somebody quite other in the room? She looked at his tired back and roughened hair with a great rush of pity and pain and longing to help, but it did not reach him. His wet wristbands and soaked boots blurred before her misty eyes, but he did not guess or care. Love was round him, kissing his hand, begging at his knee, pressing his aching head to rest, but he could not feel it. She might have drawn his attention with a word, a touch, but she left the one unspoken, the other unperformed. There are rights belonging to unself-conscious friendship that shrinking, fastidious love will never claim. How could he _not_ know? Ah, but he _ought_ to have known! If he had cared ever so little, he would have guessed at her presence; cared much--sprung to meet it; and, last of all, if he had loved her, he would have looked for her to come to him somehow from the very ends of the earth.