CHAPTER XI.

Katharine spent that night wondering what she could say to Professor Thornton to warn him against Mrs Stanhope's biting tongue. She felt that she must warn him, even at the risk of seeming to intrude on the privacy of his personal concerns. She believed that it would be the part of a coward to shirk the task, and yet she dreaded to undertake it. She said to herself a hundred times over that there was no reason why she should interfere; they were nothing to her--these strangers, their troubles, their tragedy were nothing to her. That was the common-sense way of looking at the whole matter. They had their own lives to live. And she had hers. In a day or two their chance companionship would be a thing of the past. Why should she be troubled about them? Willy Tonedale was right. One could not take every one's burden and carry it. Ah, there was no common-sense about the matter; but there was something else, something infinitely more compelling than calm reason--the heart's insistence.

"I must tell him," she said. And her heart was lighter when she decided that. Then came the difficulty of deciding what to say. She did not solve that problem. She fell asleep and dreamed, and when she awoke, she said:

"What was it I dreamed I said to him? Ah, I remember I said that----Ah! it has gone again."

But it came back to her when she stood with Clifford Thornton alone in the reading-room. She made no preliminaries, she offered no excuses; she behaved exactly as though nothing else could be done by her in the circumstances, as though he and she were in some desolate region alone together, and she saw some terrible danger threatening him, and cried:

"Look out! Beware!"

"Professor Thornton," she said, "yesterday I met an enemy of yours. It sounds melodramatic, perhaps, to speak of an enemy. Nevertheless, that was what she appeared to me. You probably know who she is--a Mrs Stanhope. But you cannot know how she speaks of you. No one could imagine it, unless one heard it for oneself."

His drawn face seemed to become thinner as she spoke.

"She has always disliked me," he said in a painfully strained voice.

"It is not merely dislike, it is malice," Katharine said. "It would not matter so much if you were by yourself in the world. But there is the boy to think of. Keep him away from her. She might poison his heart against you. It would be cruel for him, and cruel for you."

The expression of intense anxiety on the man's face filled Katharine's heart with pity.

"Ah," he said, as if the words were torn from him. "That is the bitterness of it; he might turn against me simply and solely because he could not understand; he----"

He broke off and looked at Katharine hopelessly. He appeared to be appealing to her for help in his distress; she could almost have heard his voice saying:

"What shall I do--what shall I do? Help me."

But the next moment his pride and reserve got the better of his momentary weakness. He gathered himself together. He asked for no details, and made no attempt to justify himself in her eyes. He did not even give a passing thought as to how much or how little she knew of his sad story. He felt instinctively that she believed in him.

He came across to her, and leaned over the table by which she was standing.

"It was beautiful of you to warn me," he said quite simply. "I know it could not have been easy. But it was the act of a true friend."

Then he went away. And Katharine, alone with her thoughts, threw herself into the arm-chair and closed her eyes.