Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/332

 "You, my deliverer!"

"I—I don't think I like you; I think you had better go away," said the young man, with a brutality of which he was unconscious.

The woman replied to this speech by sinking slowly to her knees. She lifted the noble line of her chin, which intense suffering had seemed to refine, up towards him with an ineffable gesture of appeal. It almost vouchsafed to him a sense of his own degradation.

"I see you as the one whose noble strength will heal me," she said, prostrating herself more completely, and clasping her arms about his ankles.

"Better rise, better leave me," said Northcote, bewildered by a sense of pity for his own impotence.

"You are striking me again," said the woman with a shudder that even to Northcote seemed terrible, "but every blow you give may help to make me whole."

"What can heal a murderess, a prostitute?" he asked, with a candor of selection that was intended to lacerate.

"You. You who brought me out of prison—you who delivered me from a shame to which even I dared not yield."

"Get up," said Northcote, filled with an unaccountable pang. "Sit there, and try to compose yourself a little."

With an indescribable impulse, which he had no means of fathoming, he raised the trembling, shuddering form by the shoulders, and let it into the chair nearest the fire. The act was wholly without premeditation, but there was nothing in it that par