“That isn’t very comforting, is it?” she asked with the least tinge of irony. She seemed more mature than he had thought her before, and she was purposely making conversation difficult. In a few minutes his father and Mrs. Craighill would return and he must make the most of his time. His tone was lower as he began again, on a new tack, and she listened with reluctant attention. “When I met you I was well started to the bad and I had every intention of keeping on. I was going to do a particular thing and it was vile--it was the worst. Why is it that you are standing in the way of it? Oh, I know you don’t understand--if you did you wouldn’t let me speak to you; but it’s because you _don’t_ understand--it’s because you couldn’t understand, that it’s so strange that you are blocking me. And not only that, but here you are in this house--this house that was my mother’s, and you bring her back to me as you sit there--just where she used to sit. The sight of you makes all these later years of my life hideous to me: I can’t do the thing I meant to--I see how foul it was; and I’m saying this to you now because I’m afraid of losing you--I’m afraid of your going away where you can’t help me any more.” She had been obliged to read much into his strange appeal; it was as though he turned the leaves of a book swiftly, disclosing only half-pages, with type blurred and indecipherable. She looked at him wonderingly; there was a cry in his last words that touched her. It had been easy the day before to simulate feeling in his assault upon Mrs. Craighill’s emotions at Rosedale but he had no wish to deceive this girl. Her eyes forbade it; and it was not so long ago that the sharp lash of her scorn had struck him in the face: “_I don’t care for your acquaintance, Mr. Wayne Craighill._” She was saying now: “I am glad if I have ever helped you, though I don’t in the least understand how that could be. It is not for me to help anyone. No one who isn’t strong can help another; we must be sure of ourselves first, and I am weak and I have made sad mistakes; I have done harm and caused heartache. And more than that, we belong to different worlds, you and I. I have tried to say this to you before, but we must understand it now. Our meetings have certainly been strange, but as I told you, I’m not superstitious. Very likely we shall never meet again, and you will go on your way just as though you never had seen me, and I will go about my business--and so----” “But if you knew I was going to the bad, and you could save me and I asked you to help, would you feel the same way about it? Maybe the answer is that I’m not worth saving!”