He waited thus in silence for one or two moments, and then an expression of exquisite tenderness and sympathy came into his face. His patient grey eyes looked at her bowed head with the look of a sorrowful god. Gently he sat down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder. “Lacrima--dear--I am sorry--I oughtn’t to have said that. I didn’t mean it. On my solemn oath I didn’t mean it! Lacrima, please don’t cry. I can’t bear it when you cry. It was all absolute nonsense what I said just now. It is the devil that gets into me and makes me say those things! Lacrima--darling Lacrima--we won’t tease one another any more.” Her sobs diminished under the obvious sincerity of his words. She lifted up a tear-stained face and threw her arms passionately round his neck. “I’ve no one but you,” she cried, “no one, no one!” For several minutes they embraced each other in silence--the girl’s breast quivering with the after-sighs of her emotion and their tears mingling together and falling on Mr. Quincunx’s beard. Had Gladys Romer beheld them at that moment she would certainly have been strengthened in her healthy-minded mocking contempt for sentimental “slobbering.” When they had resumed a more normal mood their conversation continued gently and quietly. “Of course you are right,” said Mr. Quincunx. “I am not really happy at the office. Who _could_ be happy in a place of that kind? But it is my life--and one has to do what one can with one’s life! I have to pretend to myself that they like me there, and that I am making myself useful--otherwise I simply could not go on. I have to pretend. That’s what it is! It is my pet illusion, my little fairy-story. It was that that made me get angry with you--that and the devil. One doesn’t like to have one’s fairy-stories broken into by the brutal truth.” “Poor dear!” said Lacrima softly, stroking his hand with a gesture of maternal tenderness. “If there was any hope of this wretched business coming to an end,” Maurice went on, “it would be different. Then I would curse all these people to hell and have done with it. But what can I do? I am already past middle age. I shouldn’t be able to get anything else if I gave it up. And I don’t want to leave Nevilton while you are here.” The girl looked intently at him. Then she folded her hands on her lap and began gravely. “I have something to tell you, Maurice dear. Something very important. What would you say if I told you that it was in my power to set you free from all this and make you happy and comfortable for the rest of your life?” An invisible watcher from some more clairvoyant planet than ours would have been interested at that moment in reading the double weakness of two poor Pariah hearts. Lacrima, brought back from the half-insane attitudes of her heroic resolution by the intermission of natural human emotion, found herself on the brink of half-hoping that her friend would completely and indignantly refuse this shameful sacrifice.