He touched her arm, and they stopped again, face to face. ‘Tell me what difference exactly you see,’ he said. ‘I am quite myself again now, honestly; please tell me just the very worst you think.’ ‘I think, to begin with,’ she began, with exaggerated candour, ‘his is rather a detestable face.’ ‘And mine?’ he said gravely. ‘Why—very troubled; oh yes—but his was like some bird of prey. Yours—what mad stuff to talk like this!—not the least symptom, that I can see, of—why, the “prey,” you know.’ They had come to the wicket in the dark thorny hedge. ‘Would it be very dreadful to walk on a little—just to finish?’ ‘Very,’ she said, turning as gravely at his side. ‘What I wanted to say was—’ began Lawford, and forgetting altogether the thread by which he hoped to lead up to what he really wanted to say, broke off lamely; ‘I should have thought you would have absolutely despised a coward.’ ‘It would be rather absurd to despise what one so horribly well understands. Besides, we weren’t cowards—we weren’t cowards a bit. My childhood was one long, reiterated terror—nights and nights of it. But I never had the pluck to tell any one. No one so much as dreamt of the company I had. Ah, and you didn’t see either that my heart was absolutely in my mouth, that I was shrivelled up with fear, even at sight of the fear on your face in the dark. There’s absolutely nothing so catching. So, you see, I _do_ know a little what nerves are; and dream too sometimes, though I don’t choose charnelhouses if I can get a comfortable bed. A coward! May I really say that to ask my help was one of the bravest things in a man I ever heard of. Bullets—that kind of courage—no real woman cares twopence for bullets. An old aunt of mine stared a man right out of the house with the thing in her face. Anyhow, whether I may or not, I do say it. So now we are quits.’ ‘Will you—’ began Lawford, and stopped. ‘What I wanted to say was,’ he jerked on, ‘it is sheer horrible hypocrisy to be talking to you like this—though you will never have the faintest idea of what it has meant and done for me. I mean... And yet, and yet, I do feel when just for the least moment I forget what I am, and that isn’t very often, when I forget what I have become and what I must go back to—I feel that I haven’t any business to be talking with you at all. “Quits!” And here I am, an outcast from decent society. Ah, you don’t know—’