the dreary reality of her life. Yet that same maternal instinct
which made her love a thing more of giving than of asking endowed him
with a greater dearness, as she realized the truth.

"Yes, dear," she said in a low voice, "I know--and I've been thinking of
you all the while."

Then for a quarter of an hour he recited his griefs and forgot hers. She
was there near him; his arms were about her and she was comforting him.
That, for him, was all that was necessary. But at the end of it all she
rose and turned half from him and her face was pale.

"If there was a single thing I could do," she said from her heart, "I
would do it at any cost--" Her voice questioned him tensely. "You know
that, don't you, dear? You believe it."

"You are doing something now," he declared. "You are giving me your own
strength."

To herself she said bitterly that to make a mistake once is an accident
with which life may ambush the most wary, but to walk twice into the
same snare stamps the victim as a fool. She was paying the price now of
that folly. She was indeed giving him, as he enthusiastically declared,
her own strength for his adversities, and he was accepting it, using it,
burning it up with no thought of how little of that particular capital
she had to squander in the sharing.

Even at that moment with his self-pitying voice in her ears, reciting
his Iliad of reflected troubles, her mind found a whimsical parallel for
his self-absorption. He was like some unheroic wanderer in desert
places who had stumbled upon another equally unfortunate, but more
stalwart of heart. He had greedily fallen upon the depleted
water-supply, drinking deep and never pausing to consider that the
tongue of the wayfarer who offered him a flask was more parched than his
own. He was a minstrel and a troubadour who held himself immune from the
need of meeting stress with combat. His mission in life was to sing and
accept, and now it pleased him to sing sadly of himself.

Yet the one way she could not go on helping him was the particular way
he elected to be helped. He chose to let himself drift and vacillate,
and the aid that he asked of her was that she should drift near enough
for him to have her companionship. He was like a wakeful child who
required that she, too, should be sleepless that he might escape
loneliness.

"And so," she said, forcing a smile, which concealed all that was in her
heart, "you were lonely, and you came to me."

"Yes, dear."