He drew up a chair and sat down beside her. “After all,” he said, in a tone of good-humoured protest, “I needn’t have told you I’d kept back your letter; and my telling you seems rather strong proof that I hadn’t any very nefarious designs on you.” She met this with a shrug, but he did not give her time to answer. “My designs,” he continued with a smile, “were not nefarious. I saw you’d been through a bad time with Mrs. Murrett, and that there didn’t seem to be much fun ahead for you; and I didn’t see--and I don’t yet see--the harm of trying to give you a few hours of amusement between a depressing past and a not particularly cheerful future.” He paused again, and then went on, in the same tone of friendly reasonableness: “The mistake I made was not to tell you this at once--not to ask you straight out to give me a day or two, and let me try to make you forget all the things that are troubling you. I was a fool not to see that if I’d put it to you in that way you’d have accepted or refused, as you chose; but that at least you wouldn’t have mistaken my intentions.--Intentions!” He stood up, walked the length of the room, and turned back to where she still sat motionless, her elbows propped on the dressing-table, her chin on her hands. “What rubbish we talk about intentions! The truth is I hadn’t any: I just liked being with you. Perhaps you don’t know how extraordinarily one can like being with you...I was depressed and adrift myself; and you made me forget my bothers; and when I found you were going--and going back to dreariness, as I was--I didn’t see why we shouldn’t have a few hours together first; so I left your letter in my pocket.” He saw her face melt as she listened, and suddenly she unclasped her hands and leaned to him. “But are YOU unhappy too? Oh, I never understood--I never dreamed it! I thought you’d always had everything in the world you wanted!” Darrow broke into a laugh at this ingenuous picture of his state. He was ashamed of trying to better his case by an appeal to her pity, and annoyed with himself for alluding to a subject he would rather have kept out of his thoughts. But her look of sympathy had disarmed him; his heart was bitter and distracted; she was near him, her eyes were shining with compassion--he bent over her and kissed her hand. “Forgive me--do forgive me,” he said. She stood up with a smiling head-shake. “Oh, it’s not so often that people try to give me any pleasure--much less two whole days of it! I sha’n’t forget how kind you’ve been. I shall have plenty of time to remember. But this IS good-bye, you know. I must telegraph at once to say I’m coming.” “To say you’re coming? Then I’m not forgiven?” “Oh, you’re forgiven--if that’s any comfort.” “It’s not, the very least, if your way of proving it is to go away!” She hung her head in meditation. “But I can’t stay.--How CAN I stay?” she broke out, as if arguing with some unseen monitor.