ow. "Oh! he will get
the letter--and I shall not be dead! I must go at once--at once!"

"To save yourself from being ridiculous? You are going to kill yourself
so as to keep a tragic attitude that you've taken before this man who
doesn't care for you--an attitude that's really disarranged?
Dear--pitiful--enchanting little idiot!" said Haldicott.

He had risen too, and, holding her hands, he still, but not too
obviously, kept her near him.

His words were almost cruel in their lightness; his voice had a feeling
that, more than any words, any supplication or remonstrance, made her
past life seem illusory, and she herself, with it, disappearing into
pure nothingness. The world rocked with her. Only the feeling in that
voice seemed real.

"Are you sure, are you sure," he said, "that you can never love anybody
else? Won't you wait a year to find out? Won't you wait a month? Allida,
won't you wait a day?"

"Why do you try to humiliate me?" she gasped, and the tears fell down
her face. He almost feared that he had been brutal, that she was going
to faint.

"I am not trying to humiliate you. I am trying to wake you. Perhaps the
truth will wake you. Will you wait a day, an hour, Allida, and see?"

"See what?"

"That this is a dream; that you wove it out of nothing to fill the
emptiness of your sad life; that it would have gathered round the first
'dear sympathetic' person who smiled at you. And after you see that,
will you wait and see----" he paused.

"What?" she repeated.

"How much I can make you love me," said Haldicott.

"Why do you mock me?" Allida said. "Why, unless you think me mad?"

"Well, of course you _are_ mad, in a sense; any coroner's inquest would
say so. But _mock_ you! I love you, Allida."

Her face had now as wild, as frozen a look on it as the one he had seen,
not three hours before, after she had slipped the letter into the
pillar-box; but it was with another wildness--of wonder rather than of
despair.

"But how can you?" she faltered.

"I can tell you how, but you must wait an hour--more than an hour--to
hear. You will wait--Allida?"

"It is pity, to save me."

"To save you? Why, I'd hand you over to the nearest policeman if I only
wanted to save you. I _do_ want to save you--for myself."

There drifted through her mind a vision of her little room, where, by
this time, she might have been lying on the bed, the empty bottle of
poison near her. And that vision of death was now far away