"You can't," he said, and he spoke with a gust of passion as one half maddened. "No one can help me." She saw his wildness, and somehow her strength went out to him. "You can't think what I've been through," he said, with something worse than rage entering his voice. She knew she couldn't even guess, and was too wise to try. But again she was hurt by the sight of a suffering it could never be hers to heal. "Henry," she said, "I would like you always to feel and always to remember that whatever happens to you, and wherever you are, I am your friend, if only I may be." To this high and rare simplicity of Athena the goddess, he could make no response. "And now I must go," she said, gathering the whole force of her resolution. "Suppose I walk with you a little of the way?" he said. She almost guessed that he meant it for their last stroll together. It was a long step from the scene of the tea party to Mary's door, but no finer evening for a walk could have been desired. Neither knew why they chose to take it. For both it was a mere prolongation of misery. Perhaps it was that he still hoped, against hope itself, for the moment to return in which it would be possible to tell the secret that locked his lips. Humiliated as he was, there may still have been that thought in his mind. But it was vain in any case. There could be no real intention now of telling her. By the time they had crossed the park, he had cast it entirely away. And now they fell to talking of other matters. Unwilling to let her go, cleaving to her in his weakness to the very last second of the very last hour, he persuaded her to sit a few minutes on an empty bench under the trees ... under the trees within whose shade he had sat when he had seen her first. And there he had from her lips a definite expression of her faith. It was with that they parted--finally, as he believed. He dared not put it to himself in a way so explicit, it was not a thing he could face in such bare, set terms, but in his brain the Aladdin's lamp was burning fitfully, and it was this that flashed the cruel light of truth. "... If ever you want help!" Those were the words of their parting, as the pressure of his fingers met the last touch of hers. And then she was gone, and he was gone ... and then a bleak, dull blindness came over him and he knew that more than life had gone with her. XVIII A rudderless ship in mid-ocean, he wandered long and aimlessly about the byways of the city. It was past midnight when he found himself back in Brinkworth Street. Without taking off his clothes, he flung himself face down on his bed.