He considered a moment. "My name is David—David Smith," he said at last. He felt unable to give away the name he loved and had dishonored.
"Mine is Veronica—Veronica Leigh, but I am always called Rona." She gazed into his face with some kind of wistful intentness. "You are the first young man—I mean, of the real human kind—that I have ever spoken to," she said earnestly.
The color sprang up under his white face. "I'm not the human kind—that is—I'm all wrong," he said hastily. "No respectable person would speak to me. I have no right to talk to you, or to any good girl. Are you a good girl?"
"I want to be," said Rona, looking at him with startled eyes. "What have you done? You seem—I don't know how to say it, but to me you seem—right—the kind of person I understand—not a beast—not a demon. The men in London," she concluded seriously, "are all beasts and demons."
"I don't know which class I am," said Felix, "but you had better know the worst of me. I have served a term of two years' imprisonment. That means that hardly any walk of life is open to me. I am a man without a character."
She looked at him with a shrinking horror. "In prison! Oh! What did you do?"
"I was in prison for my political opinions, not for theft or anything of that kind."
She seemed to ponder this. "I didn't know they could put people in prison for their political opinions. I thought they passed an Act—the Mother Superior taught us that in England everybody was free."
The young man's eyes darkened. "We won't talk about it," he said shortly. "I have confessed to you the sort I am. Are you sorry you did not leave me to starve?"
She still sat considering him gravely. Her eyes were very dark blue, and the intensity of their gaze was embarrassing. "Are you sorry now for having done the thing they put you in prison for?" she asked at last.