“Won’t you come in?” she asked, drawing slightly aside with a politeness which he felt to be an effort to her, “my room is not very orderly, but perhaps you will not mind?”

She wore a simple cotton blouse, the sleeves of which were a little rumpled as if they had been rolled up above her elbows, and her skirt of some ugly brown stuff was shabby and partly frayed about the edges—­but when she looked at him with her sincere blue eyes, he forgot the disorder of her dress in the touching pathos of her gallant little figure.  She was very pretty, he saw, in a fragile yet resolute way—­like a child that is possessed of a will of iron—­and because of her prettiness he found himself resenting her literary failures with an acute personal resentment.  The tenderness of his sympathy seemed to increase rather than diminish his hopeless love for Laura, and while he gazed at Christina’s flower-like eyes and smooth brown hair, which shone like satin, there stole over him a poetic melancholy that was altogether pleasant It was as if he had suddenly discovered a companion in his unhappiness, and he thought all at once that it would be charming to pour the sorrows of his love into the pretty ears hidden so quaintly under the smooth brown hair.  Love, at the moment, appeared to him chiefly as something to be talked about—­an emotion which one might turn effectively into the spoken phrase.

She drew back into the room and he followed her while his sympathetic glance dwelt upon the sleeping couch under its daytime covering of cretonne, upon the small gas stove on which a kettle boiled, upon the cupboard, the dressing table, the desk at which she wrote, and the torn and mended curtains before the single window.  Though she neither apologised nor showed in her manner the faintest embarrassment, he felt instinctively that her fierce maidenly pride was putting her to torture.

“I came with a message from my mother,” he hastened to explain as he stood beside her on the little strip of carpet before the gas stove, “she sends me to beg that you will dine with us this evening as a particular favour to her.  She is so much alone, you know, that a young visitor is just what she needs.”

Christina continued to regard him, as she had done from the first, with her sincere, unsmiling eyes, but he saw a flush rise slowly to her face in a wave of colour, turning the faint pink in her cheeks to crimson.

“I am very much obliged to her,” she said, in her fresh attractive voice, “but I am just in the middle of a story and I cannot break off just now.  I write,” she added positively, “every evening.”

As she finished she picked up some closely written sheets from the desk and held them loosely in her hand, enforcing by a gesture the unalterableness of her decision.  “I hope you will give her my love—­my dear love,” she said presently, with girlish sweetness, “and tell her how sorry I am that it is impossible.”