This, perhaps, was why he felt utterly astounded when Blanche suddenly burst into tears, and began rocking herself backwards and forwards.

"Oh, Mark!" she sobbed.

"Oh, Mark, I'm so unhappy,--I'm so miserable--I'm so frightened.
Do--do help me!" "That's just what I came to do," he said simply.

But he was very much troubled.

Her face was full of a kind of agonized appeal....
Greatly daring, he bent down over her, and gathered her into his arms.
She clung to him convulsively; and, all at once, there came insistently to Mark Gifford, George Herbert's beautiful saying: "There is an hour in which a man may be happy all his life, can he but find it." Perhaps that hour, that moment, had come to him now.
"Blanche," he whispered, "Blanche--darling! You didn't really mean what you wrote yesterday?
Don't you think the time has come when two such old friends as you and I might--" "-- make fools of themselves ?" She looked up at him, and there came a quivering smile over her disfigured face.