to tell her, with even greater fulness than he had told the
doctor. She listened with the interest women take in anything weird, and
with a compassion for him which she did not conceal so perfectly but
that he saw it. At the end he said: "You may wonder that I come to you
with all this, which must sound like the ravings of a madman."

"No--no," she hesitated.

"I came because I wished you to know everything about me
before--before--I wouldn't have come, you'll believe me, if I hadn't had
the doctor's assurance that my trouble was merely a part of my being
physically out of kilter, and had nothing to do with my sanity--Good
Heavens! What am I saying? But the thought has tormented me so! And in
the midst of it I've allowed myself to--Mrs. Yarrow, I love you. Don't
you know that?"

Alford may have had a divided mind in this declaration, but after that
one word Mrs. Yarrow had no mind for anything else. He went on.

"I'm not only sick--so sick that I sha'n't be able to do any work for a
year at least--but I'm poor, so poor that I can't afford to be sick."

She lifted her eyes and looked at him, where she sat oddly aloof from
those possessions of hers, to which she seemed so little related, and
said, with a smile quivering at the corners of her pretty mouth, "I
don't see what that has to do with it."

"What do you mean?" He stared at her hard.

"Am I in duplicate or triplicate, this time?"

"No, you're only one, and there's none like you! I could never see any
one else while I looked at you!" he cried, only half aware of his
poetry, and meaning what he said very literally.

But she took only the poetry. "I shouldn't wish you to," she said, and
she laughed.

He could not believe yet in his good-fortune. His countenance fell. "I'm
afraid I don't understand, or that you don't. It doesn't seem as if I
could get to the end of my unworthiness, which isn't voluntary. It seems
altogether too base. I can't let you say what you do, if you mean it,
till you know that I come to you in despair as well as in love. You
saved me from the fear I was in, again and again, and I believe that
without you I shall--Ah, it seems very base! But the doctor--If I could
always tell some one--if I could tell _you_ when these things were
obsessing me--haunting me--they would cease--"

Mrs. Yarrow rose, with rather a piteous smile. "Then, I am a
prescription!" She hoped, woman-like, that she was solely a passion; but
is any woman worth havin