"It is insisting on the commonplace to remind you, ma'am, that the darkest hour comes before dawn. Yet it is a well-known natural phenomenon." Priscilla leaned her head against the door-post. She stood there motionless, her hands hanging by her side, her eyes shut, her mouth slightly open, the very picture of one who has given up. "Drink some milk, ma'am. At least endeavour to." She took no heed of him. "For God's sake, ma'am, do not approach these slight misadventures in so tragic a spirit. You have done nothing wrong whatever. I know you accuse yourself. It is madness to do so. I, who have so often scolded you, who have never spared the lash of my tongue when in past years I saw fair reason to apply it, I tell you now with the same reliable candour that your actions in this village and the motives that prompted them have been in each single case of a stainless nobility." She took no heed of him. He stooped down and picked up the glass. "Drink some milk, ma'am. A few mouthfuls, perhaps even one, will help to clear the muddied vision of your mind. I cannot understand," he went on, half despairing, half exasperated, "what reasons you can possibly have for refusing to drink some milk. It is a feat most easily accomplished." She did not move. "Do you perchance imagine that a starved and badly treated body can ever harbour that most precious gift of the gods, a clear, sane mind?" She did not move. He looked at her in silence for a moment, then put down the glass. "This is all my fault," he said slowly. "The whole responsibility for this unhappiness is on my shoulders, and I frankly confess it is a burden so grievous that I know not how to bear it." He paused, but she took no notice. "Ma'am, I have loved you." She took no notice. "And the property of love, I have observed, is often to mangle and kill the soul of its object." She might have been asleep. "Ma'am, I have brought you to a sorry pass. I was old, and you were young. I experienced, you ignorant. I deliberate, you impulsive. I a man, you a woman. Instead of restraining you, guiding you, shielding you from yourself, I was most vile, and fired you with desires for freedom that under the peculiar circumstances were wicked, set a ball rolling that I might have foreseen could never afterwards be stopped, put thoughts into your head that never without me would have entered it, embarked you on an enterprise in which the happiness of your whole life was doomed to shipwreck." She stirred a little, and sighed a faint protest. "This is very terrible to me--of a crushing, killing weight. Let it not also have to be said that I mangled your very soul, dimmed your reason, impaired the sweet sanity, the nice adjustment of what I know was once a fair and balanced mind." She raised her head slowly and looked at him. "What?" she said. "Do you think--do you think I'm going mad?" "I think it very likely, ma'am," said Fritzing with conviction. A startled expression crept into her eyes.