oked,
she thought, like a boy who had been forbidden some longed-for pleasure;
she found it difficult to keep pace with him.

"She's so very, very young," Lizzie went on, "I expect you forget
that--she's filled, above everything else, with a determination to
express her own individuality, a protest, you know, against its having
been squashed by her family.

"Anything that helps her to express it she seizes on. You helped
her--she seized on you. Now all her heart is stirred by this disaster to
her husband, the most active person she's ever known absolutely
helpless, so now that has seized her. She can't have two things in her
mind at once--that's where her troubles come from--she cares for you.
You'll always be something to her that no one else can ever be, and oh!
it's so much better, so much, much better, than if you'd gone off, made
a mess of it all, spoilt all your beautiful ideas of one another."

The thrill in her voice made him, even though he was intensely concerned
with his own wrongs and losses, consider her. What Lizzie Rand was this?
It flung him back, almost against his will, as though he hated to throw
over all the ideas he had formed of her, to that first meeting when they
had stood at the window and looked out on the grey square and he had
called it the Pool. Then he had suspected her of emotion and sentiment;
it was afterwards, when he had made her his wise Counsellor and
common-sense Adviser, that he had thought of her as unemotional.

He felt now that he had been treating her rather badly. He stopped
abruptly and looked down at her; there was something in her earnest gaze
at him, something rather nervous and hesitating that did not belong at
all to the efficient Miss Rand.

"It _is_ good of you, Miss Rand, to have come and given me this note.
I'm finding it all rather difficult at the moment, as I'm sure you'll
understand. I'd better go off somewhere by myself a bit, I think, but it
was good of you." He broke off and stared desolately about him. He was
not very far from tears, she thought.

She too remembered their first meeting. She had found him melodramatic
then, a little insincere--Now she knew that she had been wrong. He was
sincere as a child is sincere; the world was utterly black, was
transcendently bright as it was for a child.

She understood him so well--so much better than Rachel. She knew that
neither he nor Rachel would ever have had the wisdom to endure that
romantic impatience t