His voice is very low, his face pale, despite the bronzing of Indian suns. His eyes rest on her with a great sadness and a great longing in their depths. She is so much to him--this woman sitting there, with the dying daylight on her rich-hued dress, and the fire-gleams playing over the drooped golden head. So much, and he---- Oh, fool that he has been to lose her! "I thought men's memories were never faithful," she murmurs, in answer to his last words. "I know you judge them very harshly," he answers coldly. "I only trust that the effeminate, long-haired apostles of your new school may prove more virtuous, if less manly, than the old type." She half smiles. "Physical strength is always impatient of anything weak or imperfect. A man like yourself dwarfs most of our modern youth into insignificance. But there are noble souls sometimes in the feeblest bodies, just as----" "Thank you," he says, as she hesitates; "I can quite follow your meaning, and accept it." She flushes hotly. "Pray do not misunderstand me," she says hurriedly. "Do not suppose----" "Oh, no," he answers, gazing back into her uplifted eyes with the ardour of past years kindling in his own. "I don't think I ever did _that_. It was you who misunderstood _me_." "I thought--I hoped you might have forgotten," she says, in confusion. "It is strange that I have not," he answers. "Thirteen years of such a life as mine ought to have knocked sentiment pretty well out of one. But somehow it is not easy to forget what pains one most. Joys may be soon crowded out of mind and memory; sorrows cling to us despite ourselves." She is silent. His words fill her with a strange trouble. The past comes back again, and she sees her girlhood's hero--a hero no longer, but a man, erring, sinful, faulty, as all men and women are and will be in this troubled world. And yet now she feels she understands him better than she did in those days when she had idealized him into something grander, nobler, greater than it lay in any man's power to be. "When I left you," he resumes presently, gaining courage to speak on in the silence of the gathering dusk, "I left all the best part of my life. You were very hard on me, but I will not say that I did not deserve it. Still, your conduct did not drive me desperate, did not make me reckless, but rather filled me with shame and sorrow to think of how far I had fallen short of your worth, your love----" "Oh hush," she interrupts. "Do you think I am so poor and contemptible that I can listen to your words and not feel the sting of my own vanity, my childish ignorance, and stubborn pride? Why, I have never thought of my words that day without bitter shame; and you--you were too generous even to reproach me." "I had no right to do that," he says, very gently. "I acted for the best, as I thought; I wished to spare you. You misunderstood me; that was all."