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 "God knows I don't want to make you any trouble, girl," he said. "I've come a long ways just to look at you."

"Is that why you came, Tom?"

His charm for her was reasserting itself; she felt breath—less.

"What else?" He glanced around, but no one at the moment was observing them. "Look here, you may hear things about me as time goes on. You will, maybe; I'm human. But this goes, now and for keeps. There's only you for me. I've been trying to think different, but it isn't any use."

Then the lights were switched on and he drew back.

She looked back at him from the top of the steps. He was standing alone gazing after her with a sort of smouldering intensity, a queer, incongruous and lonely figure. She felt a choking pity for him, so out of place, his big muscles bursting through his horrible coat, the fatigue of his long journey and even the dust of it plainly in evidence. But with that pity there was pride, too. He was a man; beside those easy, well-dressed popinjays who had been amusing themselves with him, he loomed head and shoulders. He was a man.