for having sent him
a piece of intolerably bad work. I have deserved every word he has to
say, and now I must make amends to him.'

'You have not been fortunate in your work lately?'she asked.

'I have not been fortunate,' he answered; 'I have been so far from
fortunate that' I have been writing like an untrained schoolboy. I could
have done better before I was fifteen.'

'But why is that? she asked. 'Your mind should only just now be
ripening. Your time is all your own.'

'There is not one minute of my time my own,' he answered in a
smouldering wrathfulness.

'Why not?' she questioned.

'Come,' said Paul, 'isn't that just a little disingenuous? Don't you
know why not? Here am I,' he went on, 'as I do most solemnly believe,
as madly in love as ever man was in the history of the world; petted,
encouraged, and caressed, and ignored, and repulsed, until in the insane
weakness of my own nature I have let all manhood ooze out of me. I am
unlike Hamlet, my dear Gertrude. I am both to be fretted and played
upon.'

'Played upon?' she said reproachfully.

'Played upon,' he repeated with what sounded like a weighty
deliberation.

Gertrude began to cry, and set a dainty handkerchief to her eyes, but
she said nothing, and Paul's only resource was to go on talking, to keep
himself in sight of his own injuries.

'You and I made a bargain, Gertrude: we were to be friends, and no
more than friends. You have known all along how much it cost me to
keep within those limits; and have you helped me? I put that to your
conscience.'

'Helped you?' she asked, pausing once more in her walk, and looking up
at him in an innocent bewilderment.

'Helped me,' he repeated stonily. 'The words are plain enough.'

There was a garden-seat near at hand. She hastened to it, and sinking
down upon it, seemed to surrender herself to tears. He moved moodily
after her, and stood looking down at the pathway, tracing haphazard
figures on its moss-grown surface with the cane he carried.

'I understand you now,' sobbed Gertrude. 'I have a right to reproach
myself because my own undisciplined heart has gone beyond control
sometimes; but does it lie in your province, Paul, to blame me for that?
Have I not an equal right,' she went on, 'to tell you that you have not
helped me in the daily struggle I have had to make? You are unjust, you
are ungenerous. I could never have believed it of you.'

'I can foresee nothing,' Paul said, 'but misery.'

'N