"Ah! why embitter the first confidential hour we are passing together?" she murmured faintly. "We have no confidential hours to pass together," he answered roughly. She folded her hands. "My God, I know it, I know all. What I said just now was said to force my own conscience into trying to cheer you.... What good can come of filling each other's ears with lamentations?" He was silent. How everything was reversed since that morning on the island! She now defended the standpoint that he had then taken up, while he let himself be swayed by consciousness of sin as she had done then. A few minutes before he had feared nothing so much as to hear her lament, now he himself was driving her to it. "You are right, Lizzie," he said, "we must quietly contain ourselves, and spare each other reproaches, for old sins can't be undone. But the devil take us if we forget the object for which we have entered into this new alliance." "How, in God's name, could we forget it?" she cried, putting her hands before her face. He breathed a sigh of relief. Now that their mutual purity of motive had been solemnly attested on both sides afresh, he need no longer be so much on his guard, and might without suspicion and self-reproach give himself up to the charm of this dreaded _tête-à-tête_. And indeed it was not without its charm. Here was a sympathetic echo to those thoughts which for months had tormented him, growing harder and more frequent day by day, bound up, as it were, with every experience, meeting, and memory, and yet remaining unspoken, so that their weight on his overburdened heart had been well-nigh unbearable. Out of this pair of blue swimming eyes his own guilt looked at him confidingly, softened and cleared by the woman's grace. No harsh judgments blared from those soft lips, and when they whisperingly alluded to a sin which had better have remained unmentioned, they did so with a mild self-accusation that in itself was for him forgiveness. That was comforting--ay, it was comforting. He leaned back in his chair with a murmur of satisfaction, and asked if he might light a cigar. "You know you may do anything you like," she replied, and rose to fetch him a tray and matches. "Are you going to wait on me?" he exclaimed, springing up. "Yes; let me. I like it, and you know it's not the first time," she said, with her melancholy smile.