Sympathy, he thought, actuated him.  He took the averted face between his hands and raised it gently, but with a strong pressure until the tear-stained eyes were looking into his own.

Her lips were very petal-like and her eyes were very dewy and on each cheek bloomed a spot of color heightened by the pallor of the moment.

Paul Burton at the instant forgot Loraine Haswell, the prize of his brother’s grand larceny for his pleasure, forgot that this woman was no more than his Platonic friend and remembered only that her chin rested in his hand and that his arm encircled her, as he bent his head and pressed his lips against the mouth that trembled.

He did not think of the demonstration as necessarily loverlike.  His nature was instinctive, not analytical, but suddenly there swept into the utterly lonely and battle-weary eyes of the woman, who was not a child, a smile of happiness and comfort which parted her lips, so that her face reminded him of sudden sunshine flashing into rainbow hope through an April shower.  He could feel the heart fluttering wildly in her breast, and at once he knew that to her his kiss had meant an avowal of love—­that in her code there was no place for light or unmeaning caresses.

He rose and his face paled.  The indecisiveness which never dared to grasp the thistle firmly was troubling him with a new dilemma.  Yet something in Marcia Terroll made a call upon him which no other woman had yet made—­the call to be honest at all cost.

With his averted face toward the window, in a forced and level voice, not daring to meet her eyes, he told her almost all there was to tell about Loraine Haswell.  The new spark of manhood she had awakened in him made him silent on one point.  He said nothing of his own doubts; his own wonder whether after all he loved or wanted Loraine.  Just now he fancied he wanted Marcia Terroll.

When the recital reached its end he stood for a space gazing into the fog which seemed an emblem of his own life.  He was waiting for her to speak, but the silence remained unbroken.  At last he turned and saw her sitting there no longer tearful, only a little stunned.

“I couldn’t lie to you,” he protested in a hurried utterance as he came over and knelt on the floor at her side.  “Not to you....  Of course, you know that I love you very dearly as a man loves his rarest friends....  You know what our comradeship means to me—­”

With an impulsive forward sweep of her hands she interrupted him and her voice was burdened with deep pain and heart-ache.

“Don’t!” she pleaded, and the monosyllable was like a cry.  “Oh, don’t!” Then after a little while she went on slowly:  “You are a romanticist, Paul, and a dreamer.  Some day you will wake up.  We all do.”

“It was better to tell you, dear, wasn’t it?  It would have been unfair—­”

She bowed her head wearily as though realizing the futility of expecting him to understand.  “Yes, I suppose so, only—­”