There she was, leaning on the gate just as she had been that first morning, but this time her eyes instead of being wide and blank were watching him with a deep and touching interest. He got across the road in one stride. 'Lucy!' he exclaimed. 'You? Why didn't you call me? We've wasted half an hour----' 'About two minutes,' she said, smiling up at him as he, on the other side of the gate, folded both her hands in his just as he had done that first morning; and the relief it was to Wemyss to see her again alone, to see that smile of trust and--surely--content in getting back to him! Then her face went grave again. 'I've finished father's things now,' she said, 'and so I came to look for you.' 'Lucy, how can you leave me,' was Wemyss's answer to that, his voice vibrating, 'how can you go away from me to-morrow and hand me over again to the torments--yes, torments, I was in before?' 'But I have to go,' she said, distressed. 'And you mustn't say that. You mustn't let yourself be like that again. You won't be, I know--you're so brave and strong.' 'Not without you. I'm nothing without you,' said Wemyss; and his eyes, as he searched hers, were full of tears. At this Lucy flushed, and then, staring at him, her face went slowly white. These words of his, the way he said them, reminded her--oh no, it wasn't possible; he and she stood in a relationship to each other like none, she was sure, that had ever yet been. It was an intimacy arrived at at a bound, with no preliminary steps. It was a holy thing, based on mutual grief, protected from everything ordinary by the great wings of Death. He was her wonderful friend, big in his simplicity, all care for her and goodness, a very rock of refuge and shelter in the wilderness she had been flung into when he found her. And that he, bleeding as he was himself from the lacerations of the violent rending asunder from his wife to whom he had been, as he had told her, devoted, that he should--oh no, it wasn't possible; and she hung her head, shocked at her thoughts. For the way he had said those words, and the words themselves had reminded her--no, she could hardly bear to think it, but they _had_ reminded her of the last time she had been proposed to. The man--he was a young man; she had never been proposed to by any one even approximately Wemyss's age--had said almost exactly that: Without you I am nothing. And just in that same deep, vibrating voice. How dreadful thoughts could be, Lucy said to herself, overcome that such a one at such a moment should thrust itself into her mind. Hateful of her, hateful....