ODD went in the same half-dreamy condition through the morning of the next day. He walked and read, but where he walked and what he read he could hardly have told.

He was to fetch Hilda from the Rue d’Assas and go home to tea and dinner with her. His love for Hilda had now reached such solemn heights that his late flight seemed degrading.

So loving her, he could not be base.

The Rue d’Assas was dreary in a fine drizzling rain. In the Luxembourg Gardens the first young green made a mist upon the trees.

It was only half-past four when Odd reached his accustomed post, but hardly had he taken a turn up and down the street when he saw Hilda come quickly from the Lebon abode. She was fully half-an-hour early, but Odd had merely time to note the fact before seeing in a flash that Hilda was in trouble. She looked, she almost ran toward him; and he met her half-way with outstretched hands.

“O Peter!” It was the first time she had used his name, and Odd’s heart leaped as her hands caught his with a sort of desperate relief. “Come, come,” she said, taking his arm. “Let us go quickly.” Peter’s heart after its leap began to thump fast. The white distress of her face gave him a dizzy shock of anger. What, who had distressed her? He asked the question as they crossed the road and entered the gardens. Tears now streamed down her face.

He had only once before seen Hilda weep, and as she hung shaken with sobs on his arm, the past child, the present Hilda merged into one; his one, his only love.

“Let us walk here, dear,” he said; “you will be quieter.”

The little path down which they turned was empty, and the fine rain enveloped but hardly wet them. They came to a bench under a tree, circled by an unwet area of sanded path. Odd led the weeping girl to it and they sat down. She still held his arm tightly.

“Now, what is it?”

“O Peter! I can hardly tell you! The brother, the horrible brother.”

“Yes?” Peter felt the accumulations of rage that had been gathering for months hurrying forward to spring upon, to pulverize “the brother.”

“He made love to me, said awful things!” Odd whitened to the lips.

“Tell me all you can.”

“I wish I were dead!” sobbed Hilda, “I am so unhappy.”

Peter did not trust himself to speak; he took her hand and held it to his lips.

“Yes; you care,” said Hilda. She drew herself up and wiped her eyes. “I never thought he would be unpleasant. At times I fancied that he came a good deal into the studio where we worked and, behind his sister’s back, looked silly. But he never really annoyed me. I thought myself unkindly suspicious. To-day Mademoiselle Lebon was called away and he came in. I went on painting. I did not dream—! When, suddenly he put his arms around me—and tried to kiss me!” Hilda gave an hysterical laugh. “Do you know, I had my palette on my hand, and I gave him a great blow with it! You should have seen his head! Oh, to think that I can find that funny now! His ear was covered with cobalt!” Hilda sobbed again, even while she laughed. “He was very angry and horrible. I said I would call his mother and sister if he did not leave me at once, and then—and then”—Hilda dropped her face into her hands—“he jeered at me; ‘You mustn’t play the prude,’ he said.”

Odd clenched his teeth.

“Hilda, dear,” he said, in a voice cold to severity, “you must go home; I will put you in a cab. I will come to you as soon as I have punished that dog.”

“Peter, don’t! I beg of you to come with me. You can do nothing. I must bury it, forget it.” She had risen as he rose.

“Yes, bury it, forget it, Hilda. He, at least, shall never forget it.”

Odd’s fixed look as he led her into the street forced her to helpless silence.

“Peter, please!” she breathed, clasping her hands together and gazing at him as he hailed a fiacre.

“I will come to you soon. Good-bye.”

And so Hilda was driven away.

It was past six when Odd reached the Rue Pierre Charron. Rosalie opened the door. Madame was in bed, she had had a bad day. Mademoiselle? she is lying down. She seemed ill. “Et bien malade même,” and had said that she wanted no dinner.

“I should like to see her, if only for a moment; she will see me, I think,” said Odd, walking into the drawing-room. Hilda entered almost immediately.

She had been crying, and the disorder of her hair suggested that she had cried with her head buried in a pillow, after the stifled feminine fashion. Her face was most pathetically disfigured by tears; the disfigurement almost charming of youth and loveliness; but she looked ill, too. The white cheek and the heavy eyelids, the unsteady sweetness of her lips showed that an extreme of physical exhaustion, as well as the tempest of grief, had swept her beyond all thought of self-control, beyond all wish for it. The afternoon’s unpleasantness had been merely the last straw. The long endurance of the past month—the past months indeed—that had asked no pity, had been hardly conscious of a claim on pity—was transformed by her knowledge of near love and sympathy to a quivering sensibility. There was no reticence in her glance. He was the one she turned to, the one she trusted, the only one who understood and loved her in the whole world. Odd saw all this as the supreme confidence of a supremely reserved nature looked at him from her eyes.

He met her, stooping his head to hers, and, like a child, she put up her face to be kissed. When he had kissed her, he drew back. A sudden horrible weakness almost overcame him.

“Sit down, dear; no, I will walk about a bit. I have been playing the fiery jeune premier to such an extent this afternoon that dramatic restlessness is in keeping.”

Hilda smiled faintly, and her eyes followed him as he took a few turns up and down the room.

“You look so badly,” he said, pausing before her; “how do you feel?”

“Not myself; or, perhaps, too much myself.” Hilda tried to smile, stretching out her arms with a long shaken sigh. “I feel weak and foolish,” she added, clasping her hands on her knee.

“It is all right, you know. He apologized profusely.”

“How did you make him do that?”

“I told him the truth, including the fact of his own despicableness.”

“And he believed it?”

“I helped him to the belief by a pretty thorough thrashing.”

“Oh!” cried Hilda.

“He deserved it, dear.”

“But—I had exposed myself to it; he thought himself justified.”

“I had to disabuse him of that thought. He bawled out something like a challenge under the salutary lesson, but when I promptly seconded the suggestion—insisted on the extreme satisfaction it would give me to have a shot at him—the bourgeois strain came out. He fairly whined. I was disappointed. I had bloodthirsty desires.”

“Oh, I am very glad he whined then! Don’t speak of such horrors. You know I am hysterical.”

Odd still stood before her, and Hilda put out her hand.

“How can I thank you?” He put her hand to his lips, not looking at her but down at the heavy folds of her white dress; it had a shroud-like look that gave him a shudder. Hilda’s life seemed shroud-like, shutting her out from all brightness, from all love—love hers by right, and only hers.

“You know, you know that I would do anything for you,” he said.

The hand he kissed drew him down beside her, hardly consciously, and he yielded to the longing he felt in her for comforting kindness and nearness; yielded, too, to his own growing weakness; but he still held the hand to his lips, not daring to look at her. This childlike trust, this dependence, were dreadful. The long kiss seemed to his troubled soul a momentary shield. He found her eyes on him when he raised his own.

“I never thought it would come true—in this way,” she said.

“What come true?”

“That you would really care for me.”

Her pure look seemed to flutter to him, to fold peaceful wings on his breast; its very contentment constituted a caress. The child was still a child, and yet in the look there were worlds of ignorant revelation. A shock of possibilities made Odd dizzy, and the certain strain of weakness in him made it impossible for him to warn and protect her ignorance.

He was conscious of a quick grasp at the transcendental friendship of which alone she was aware.

“My little friend, I care for you dearly, dearly.” But with the words, his hold on the transcendental friendship slipped, fundamental truths surged up; he took both her hands, and clasping them on his breast, said, hardly conscious of his words—

“Sweetest, noblest—dearest,” with an emotion only too contagious, for Hilda’s eyes filled with tears. The sight of these tears, her weakness, the horrible unfairness of her position, appealed, even at this moment, to all his manliness. He controlled himself from taking her into his arms, and his grasp on her hands held her from him.

“I understand, Hilda, I understand it all—all you have suffered; the loneliness, the injustice, the dreary drudgery. I know, dear, I know that you have been unhappy.”

“Oh yes! I have been unhappy! so unhappy!” The tears rolled down her cheeks while she spoke, fell on Odd’s hands clasping hers. “No one ever cared for me, no one. Papa, mamma, Katherine even, not really; isn’t it cruel, cruel?” This self-pity, so uncharacteristic, showing as it did the revulsion in her whole nature, filled Odd with a sort of helpless terror. “That is what I wanted; some one to care; I thought it must be my fault.” The words came in sighing breaths, incoherent: “I have been so lonely.”

“My child! My poor, poor child!”

“Let me tell you everything. I must tell you now since you care for me. I have been so fond of you—always. You remember when I was a child?” Odd held her hands tightly and mechanically. Poor little hands; they gave him the feeling of light spars clung to in a whirling shipwreck. “Even then I was lonely, I see that now; and even then it weighed upon me, that thought that I was not to the people I loved what they were to me. I felt no injustice. I must be unworthy. It seems to me that all my life I have struggled to make people love me, to make them take me near to them. But you! You were near at once. Do I explain? It sounds morbid, doesn’t it? But it isn’t, for my loneliness was almost unconscious, and I merely felt that with you I was happy, that things were clear, that you understood everything. You did, didn’t you? Only I don’t think you ever quite understood my gratitude, my utter devotion to you.” Hilda’s tears had ceased as she went on speaking, and she smiled now at Odd, a quivering smile.

“And then you went away, and I never saw you again. Ah! I can’t tell you what I suffered.”

Odd bent his head upon the hands clasped in his.

“But how could you have known?” said Hilda tenderly; “I was really very silly and very unreasonable. I thought you would come back because I needed you. I needed the sunshine. Perhaps you were right about the shadow. But for years I waited for you. I felt sure you knew I was waiting. You said you would come back you know; I never forgot that.” She paused a moment: “It all ended in Florence,” she went on sadly; “such a bleak, bitter day, just the day for burying an illusion. I see the cold emptiness of the big room now; oh! the melancholy of it! where I was sitting alone. All came upon me suddenly, the reality. You know those crumbling shocks of reality. I realized that I had waited for something that could never come; that you had never really understood, and that it would have been impossible for you to understand. I was a pretty, touching little incident to you, and you were everything to me. I realized, too, how silly it would all seem to any one; how it would be misinterprete............