"To men!" she exclaimed, shrinking. "Do you suppose I do?"
He did; but renounced the conception penitently in view of her dismay, and lent a more consciously honoured, if more embarrassed ear. But compassion overcame his embarrassment; and he thought less often of her indiscretions than of her loneliness.
She asked him to spend a week at Wallingford when the season was over.
"I have very few friends," she said; "and no one but you has ever helped me to understand."
He wondered to what he had helped her, and whether he would recognize it if she told him; but he did not wonder if he might remit the helping; the disadvantage in the gift of oneself being that the giving is never at an end.
So he came to Wallingford again in September, when the moonlight fell nightly on white veils of mist, and the world took on a golden ripeness in the mellow silent days.
Some letters, in the meanwhile, had passed between them; letters which might have made Terence uneasy had he known what they meant. Instead, he answered them, and consigned their intentions to the chaos of feminine incomprehensibility. Some of that chaos took a shape during his second stay at Wallingford sufficiently definite and disconcerting.
It was probably only what had been put, to no purpose, in her letters, but it had another significance when spoken with rather uncomfortable pauses and lit with the intensity of a woman's very lovely eyes.
To mistake its meaning was impossible; to ignore it seemed to Terence a contemptible discretion. He could not withdraw his sympathy because it had been so dangerously misapplied, but he tried, with fraternal frankness, to abstract from it the odour of personality with which she had scented it.
He hoped to animate her with the big issues of life, but to a woman there is often no issue bigger than a man's devotion.