And I know that if you go away--and I am left alone with my poor boy--though I shall never cease to hear the things he said to me--the things he asked me to do--I shall have no strength to do them.

I cannot rise and walk--unless you help me.' Elizabeth could hardly speak.

She was in presence of that tremendous thing in human experience--the emergence of a man's inmost self.
That the Squire could speak so--could feel so--that the man whose pupil and bond-slave she had been in those early weeks should be making this piteous claim upon her, throwing upon her the weight of his whole future life, of his sorrow, of his reaction against himself, overwhelmed her.

It appealed to that instinctive, that boundless tenderness which lies so deep in the true woman.
But her will seemed paralysed.

She did not know how to act--she could find no words that pleased her.