bewildered for one thing, and I did not want "to put
my foot in it" again immediately for another. And there was really no
need for me to speak, for he went on slowly, looking full at me:

"What I have to do, if I can, is to save Emmy's romance for her."

I could only stare at him.

"For twenty-five years," he went on, "that dear woman has lived on her
love for me. It has coloured her whole life. I know what I know. It has
been her support in all the endless years she nursed that cruel old
egoist her father, who would not let her marry me, when we _could_ have
married, seventeen years ago. But it is not _me_ that she wants now,
though she did want me for many years; it is the thought of me--if you
can't understand without my saying it, I can't make you--it's her
romance which is important to her, and which I want her to keep, at all
costs."

"My darling Emmy," he said, and there were tears in his hawk eyes, "the
most unselfish and devoted, the sweetest, the humblest, and the most
beautiful creature I have ever known. And she has given up everything
out of constancy to me, home, children, everything; no, not for me
exactly, but for a dream, for an ideal, for something of which I was to
her the symbol, but which I no more resemble than I resemble that frond
of bracken."

He turned his face away.

"It would have been all right if they would have let us marry when we
were both still young, and I had got a home together," he went on; "but
now it would be inhuman to root her out of her little home and drag her
across the world, and try to transplant her into my rough place. How
rough it is I see, now that I have been back in England. I did not know
it was so uncouth when I lived in it. It's the only life I'm accustomed
to, the only life I'm fit for now, though it was sorely against the
grain at first. I don't think I could have stuck to it, except for the
hope of marrying her some day. But I see now the only life I'm fit for
is not fit for her. And I can't give it up. I can't desert my poor old
uncle, who is growing infirm and depends on me entirely."

"Why did you come back?" I groaned.

"I came back," he said, "because I have cared for her and worked for her
all my life. And because I heard that her beast of a father had left her
almost penniless, and that fat Tom had married and turned her out. And
until I saw her again from day to day I did not realise the nature of
her feeling for me. I came back to offer her w