Indeed, even when that simple truth was spoken to her, it took Pamela a little while to weigh it in her thoughts and give it credence. She had travelled a long distance during these last years down her solitary road. She began to understand that now. To need--actually to need people, to feel a joy in being needed--here were emotions, familiar to most, and no doubt at one time familiar to her, which were, nevertheless, now very new and strange. At present she only needed. Would a time come when she would go further still? When she would feel a joy in being needed? The question flashed across her mind. "Yes," she admitted, "no doubt that is true. But none the less there must be no misunderstanding between you and me. I speak of myself, although it is not for myself that I need your help; but I am not blind. I know it will be for my sake that you give it, and I do not want you to give it in any ignorance of me, or, perhaps"--and she glanced at him almost shyly--"or, perhaps, expecting too much." Warrisden made no other answer than to lean forward in his chair, with his eyes upon Pamela's face. She was going to explain that isolation of hers which had so baffled him. He would not for worlds have interrupted her lest he should check the utterance on her lips. He saw clearly enough that she was taking a great step for her, a step, too, which meant much to him. The actual explanation was not the important thing. That she should confide it of her own accord--there was the real and valuable sign. As she began to speak again, diffidence was even audible in her voice. She almost awaited his judgment. "I must tell you something which I thought never to tell to any one," she said. "I meant to carry it as my secret out with me at the end of my life. I have been looking on all these last years. You noticed that; you thought perhaps I was just obeying my nature. But I wasn't. I did not begin life looking on. I began it as eager, as expectant of what life could give me as any girl that was ever born. And I had just my first season, that was all." She smiled rather wistfully as her thoughts went back to it. "I enjoyed my first season. I had hardly ever been in London before. I was eighteen; and everybody was very nice to me. At the end of July I went to stay for a month with some friends of mine on the coast of Devonshire, and--some one else stayed there, too. His name does not matter. I had met him during the season a good deal, but until he came down to Devonshire I had not thought of him more than as a friend. He was a little older than myself, not very much, and just as poor. He had no prospects, and his profession was diplomacy.... So that there was no possibility from the first. He meant never to say anything; but there came an hour, and the truth was out between us."