"Yes, empty. Will it prove the strength of my love for you if I tell you that it has given me the power to look straight into your heart? How many times have I read there the thought: 'Of what use is it all? My life has no object, no end or aim. No one needs me now.' Lois, one man needs you--needs you perhaps as much as he loves you. That man is myself. If you say you have done nothing in the world, look into the soul that I open out to you and to you alone. There is not a generous, honest deed or thought which has not its origin in you. For your sake I have beaten down the devil under my feet--I have tried to live as I meant to live before the time when I, too, found that there was no object in it all, that no one cared whether I was good or bad. This much have you changed in me--it has been your unconscious work. Are you going to leave the task which surely God has left for you to accomplish?" He had touched the chord in her which could only give one response, and he knew it. There lay the canker which made her energy and cheerfulness a mere task to hide the real disease. Half unconsciously she had loved Stafford and half unconsciously she had built her life upon him. When he had been taken from her, the foundations had been shaken, and she found herself crippled by a horrible sense of emptiness and purposelessness. In England she would have flung herself into some intellectual pursuit, as other women do who have suffered heart shipwreck. But she was in India, and in India intellectual food is scarce. Pleasure is the one serious occupation for the womenkind; and though pleasure may be a good narcotic for some, for Lois it was worse than useless. She needed one being for whom she could bring sacrifices and endless patient devotion, and there was no one. Her two guardians lived for her, and that was not what she hungered after with all the thwarted energy of her soul. She wanted to work for somebody, not to be worked for--and no one needed her, no one except this man. She looked at him. She saw that her long silence was torture to him; she saw that he was suffering genuinely, and her heart went out to him in pity. Pity is a woman's invariable undoing. How many women--sometimes happy, sometimes unhappy, according to the rulings of an inscrutable Fate--have married, partly out of flattered vanity, but chiefly because they are good-hearted, and labor under the mistaken conviction that a man's happiness rests on their decision? And in this particular instance Lois was honestly attached to Travers. She felt that to lose him would be to lose a friend whom she could ill spare. Yet a blind instinct forced her to a last resistance. "I do not love you," she repeated, almost desperately. "I do not ask for that now, because I know that it will come. I ask you to be my lifelong friend and helper. Remember your promise, Lois! Has not the time come when we need each other--when no one else is left?" He took her hand again. He felt that she was won.