"Try to help it! Try to try and help it! Say a word that you will perhaps help it by and bye." Then there came a dark frown upon her brow -- not, indeed, from anger, but from a feeling that so terrible a task should be thrown upon her. "I know you think that I am common."

"I have never said a word, Tom, but that I could not love you." "But I am true -- true as the sun. Would I come again after all if it were not that I cannot help coming? You have heard that I have been -- been misbehaving myself?"

"I have not thought about that."

"It has been so because I have been so wretched. Ayala, you have made me so unhappy. Ayala, you can make me the happiest man there is in London this day. I seem to want nothing else. As for drink, or clubs, or billiards, and all that, they are nothing to me -- unless when I try to forget that you are so -- so unkind to me!"

"It is not unkind, not to do as you ask me."

"To do as I ask you -- that would be kind. Oh, Ayala, cannot you be kind to me?" She shook her head, still standing in the place which she had occupied from the beginning. "May I come again? Will you give me three months, and then think of it? If you would only say that, I would go back to my work and never leave it." But she still shook her head. "Must I never hope?" "Not for that, Tom. How can I help it?"

"No. How can I help it? One does not fall in love by trying -- nor by trying prevent it."

"By degrees you might love me -- a little." She had said all that she knew how to say, and again shook her head. "It is that accursed Colonel," he exclaimed, forgetting himself as he thought of his rival.