He was silent again. She brooded. What did he mean? He was so wearying.
There was something he would not yield. Yet she must be patient with
him.

"I can only give friendship--it's all I'm capable of--it's a flaw in my
make-up. The thing overbalances to one side--I hate a toppling balance.
Let us have done."

There was warmth of fury in his last phrases. He meant she loved him
more than he her. Perhaps he could not love her. Perhaps she had not
in herself that which he wanted. It was the deepest motive of her
soul, this self-mistrust. It was so deep she dared neither realise nor
acknowledge. Perhaps she was deficient. Like an infinitely subtle shame,
it kept her always back. If it were so, she would do without him. She
would never let herself want him. She would merely see.

"But what has happened?" she said.

"Nothing--it's all in myself--it only comes out just now. We're always
like this towards Easter-time."

He grovelled so helplessly, she pitied him. At least she never
floundered in such a pitiable way. After all, it was he who was chiefly
humiliated.

"What do you want?" she asked him.

"Why--I mustn't come often--that's all. Why should I monopolise you when
I'm not--You see, I'm deficient in something with regard to you--"

He was telling her he did not love her, and so ought to leave her a
chance with another man. How foolish and blind and shamefully clumsy he
was! What were other men to her! What were men to her at all! But he,
ah! she loved his soul. Was HE deficient in something? Perhaps he was.

"But I don't understand," she said huskily. "Yesterday--"

The night was turning jangled and hateful to him as the twilight faded.
And she bowed under her suffering.

"I know," he cried, "you never will! You'll never believe that I
can't--can't physically, any more than I can fly up like a skylark--"

"What?" she murmured. Now she dreaded.

"Love you."

He hated her bitterly at that moment because he made her suffer. Love
her! She knew he loved her. He really belonged to her. This about not
loving her, physically, bodily, was a mere perversity on his part,
because he knew she loved him. He was stupid like a child. He belonged
to her. His soul wanted her. She guessed somebody had been influencing
him. She felt upon him the hardness, the foreignness of another
influence.

"What have they been saying at home?" she asked.

"It's not that," he answered.

And then she knew it was. She despised them f