d to ask you if I could do anything--help you in
any way, be of any use." In spite of his schooled voice his longing to
see her, his delight in seeing her, showed in his clouded, candid eyes.
Milly felt it as the difference, the vague warmth and radiance.

"How kind of you, dear Dick," she said, and her poor voice groped vainly
for firmness. "I am so glad to see you. It was good of you to come. Yes;
it has been dreadful. You know;--Christina--our friendship"--But how to
confess to Dick her remorse or explain to Dick why she had left
Christina? Her pride broke. With this human kindness near her, she could
not maintain the decorum of their tangled relations as man and woman;
the simple human relation alone became the most real one; the
loneliness and the grief of a child overwhelmed her. She sank, sobbing
helplessly, into her chair.

"Oh--Milly!"--said poor Dick Quentyn. And the longing to comfort and
console effacing his diffidence and the memory of her long unkindness
towards himself, he knelt down beside her and took her into his arms.

Milly then said and did what she could never have believed herself
capable of saying and doing. No pride could hold her from it, no
dignity, not even common shame. She could not keep herself from dropping
her face on his shoulder and sobbing;--"Oh--Dick--try--try to love me
again. I am cold and selfish. I have behaved cruelly to everyone who
loved me;--but I can't bear it any longer."

It was a startling moment for Dick Quentyn, the most startling of his
life. "Try to love you?" he stammered. He pushed her back to look at
her. "What do you mean, Milly?"

"What I say," Milly gasped.

"But what does it mean?" Dick repeated. "It isn't for you to ask me to
love you. You know I love you. You know there's never been another woman
in the world for me but you. It's you who have never loved me, Milly."

Her appeal had been like a diving under deep waters--she had not known
when or where or how she would come up again. Now she opened her eyes
and stared at her husband. She seemed, after that whirlpool moment of
abysmal shame, to have come up from the further reaches of darkness, and
it was under new, bewildering skies. Strange stars made her dizzy.

"Then why didn't you come and say good-bye to me--that day--in London
this spring?" was all she found to say.

Dick was not stupid now. The lover's code was at last open between them,
and he as well as she could read the significance of seemi