Have done," he begged.
"Nay, tell me.

Let us sit here." And taking hold of his sleeve, she sat herself upon a mound, and made room for him beside her on the grass.
With a half-laugh and a sigh he obeyed her, and there, on the cliff, in the glow of the September sun, he took his seat at her side.
A silence prevailed about them, emphasized rather than broken by the droning chant of a fisherman mending his nets on the beach below, the intermittent plash of the waves on the shingle, and the scream of the gulls that circled overhead.

Before the eyes of his flesh was stretched a wide desert of sky and water, and before the eyes of his mind the hopeless desert of his thirty-eight years.
He was almost tempted to speak.

The note of sympathy in her voice allured him, and sympathy was to him as drink to one who perishes of thirst.

A passionate, indefinable longing impelled him to pour out the story that in Worcester he had related unto Kenneth, and thus to set himself better in her eyes; to have her realize indeed that if he was come so low it was more the fault of others than his own.