For as he spoke she realized with the finality of revelation that the Paul Burton of whom she thought in her dreams had not come at all; only the Paul Burton who, too weak to bear his own sorrows, came to share them with her.  He had not come offering her strength and companionship in loneliness—­but asking them for himself.  He had not come to offer marriage.  She had, in the face of the old warnings, dreamed again—­falsely idealized once more—­and his mission was to waken in her anew the dreary reality of her life.  Yet that same maternal instinct which made her love a thing more of giving than of asking endowed him with a greater dearness, as she realized the truth.

“Yes, dear,” she said in a low voice, “I know—­and I’ve been thinking of you all the while.”

Then for a quarter of an hour he recited his griefs and forgot hers.  She was there near him; his arms were about her and she was comforting him.  That, for him, was all that was necessary.  But at the end of it all she rose and turned half from him and her face was pale.

“If there was a single thing I could do,” she said from her heart, “I would do it at any cost—­” Her voice questioned him tensely.  “You know that, don’t you, dear?  You believe it.”

“You are doing something now,” he declared.  “You are giving me your own strength.”

To herself she said bitterly that to make a mistake once is an accident with which life may ambush the most wary, but to walk twice into the same snare stamps the victim as a fool.  She was paying the price now of that folly.  She was indeed giving him, as he enthusiastically declared, her own strength for his adversities, and he was accepting it, using it, burning it up with no thought of how little of that particular capital she had to squander in the sharing.

Even at that moment with his self-pitying voice in her ears, reciting his Iliad of reflected troubles, her mind found a whimsical parallel for his self-absorption.  He was like some unheroic wanderer in desert places who had stumbled upon another equally unfortunate, but more stalwart of heart.  He had greedily fallen upon the depleted water-supply, drinking deep and never pausing to consider that the tongue of the wayfarer who offered him a flask was more parched than his own.  He was a minstrel and a troubadour who held himself immune from the need of meeting stress with combat.  His mission in life was to sing and accept, and now it pleased him to sing sadly of himself.

Yet the one way she could not go on helping him was the particular way he elected to be helped.  He chose to let himself drift and vacillate, and the aid that he asked of her was that she should drift near enough for him to have her companionship.  He was like a wakeful child who required that she, too, should be sleepless that he might escape loneliness.

“And so,” she said, forcing a smile, which concealed all that was in her heart, “you were lonely, and you came to me.”