ture and gave it to
her, and she accepted it with a fresh burst of sorrow, putting it to her
lips, studying it and weeping over it, with an absolute spontaneity and
self-abandonment which was lovely because it was so true.

'Oh, poor M. de Chateauvieux!' she cried after a long pause, looking up
to him. 'How will he live without her? He will feel himself so forsaken!'

'Yes,' said Kendal huskily; 'he will be very lonely, but--one must learn
to bear it.'

She gazed at him with quick startled sympathy, and all her womanly nature
seemed to rise into her upturned face and yearning eyes. It was as though
her attention had been specially recalled to him; as though his
particular loss and sorrow were brusquely brought home to her. And then
she was struck by the strangeness and unexpectedness of such a meeting
between them. He had been to her a judge, an authority, an embodied
standard. His high-mindedness had won her confidence; his affection for
his sister had touched and charmed her. But she had never been conscious
of any intimacy with him. Still less had she ever dreamt of sharing a
common grief with him, of weeping at his side. And the contrast between
her old relation with him and this new solemn experience, rushing in upon
her, filled her with emotion. The memory of the Nuneham day woke again in
her--of the shock between her nature and his, of her overwhelming sense
of the intellectual difference between them, and then of the thrill which
his verdict upon _Elvira_ had stirred in her. The relation which she had
regarded as a mere intellectual and friendly one, but which had been far
more real and important to her than even she herself had ever guessed,
seemed to have transformed itself since he had entered the room into
something close and personal. His last words had called up in her a sharp
impression of the man's inmost nature as it was, beneath the polished
scholarly surface. They had appealed to her on the simplest, commonest,
human ground; she felt them impulsively as a call from him to her, and
her own heart overflowed.

She rose, and went near to him, bending towards him like a spirit of
healing, her whole soul in her eyes 'Oh, I am so sorry for you!' she
exclaimed, and again the quick tears dropped. 'I know it is no common
loss to you. You were so much more to each other than brother and sister
often are. It is terrible for you.'

His whole man was stirred by her pity, by the eager expansiveness of her
sympa