never have loved him, would not indeed have thought of him twice.
He was not a man about whom any one thought twice. With the exception of his sisters no woman had ever loved him; this child, driven to terrified desperation by the horrors of the last weeks had been wakened to full womanhood by those same horrors, and he had happened to be there at the awakening. That was all. And yet he knew that so honest was she, and good and true, that did she once go to him she would stay with him. He saw steadily into the future. He saw her freedom from the madman to whom she was married, then her union with himself. His happiness, and her gradual discovery of the kind of man that he was. Not bad—oh no—but older, far older than herself in many other ways than years, tired so easily, caring nothing for all the young things in life, above all a man in the middle state, solitary from some elemental loneliness of soul. It was true that to-night had shown him a new energy of living, a new happiness, a new vigour, and he would perhaps after to-night never be the same man as he was before. But it was not enough. No, not enough for this young girl just beginning life, so ignorant of it, so trustful of him that she would follow the path that he pointed out. And for himself! How often he had felt like Nejdanov in Virgin Soil that "everything that he had said or done during the day seemed to
