“Rally, rally!” urged the other, in a stimulating tone. “Fight for it, Neville!”
“If I were dying, I feel as if a word from you would rally me; if my pulse had stopped, I feel as if your touch would make it beat again,” said Neville. “But I have rallied, and am doing famously.”
Mr. Crisparkle turned him with his face a little more towards the light.
“I want to see a ruddier touch here, Neville,” he said, indicating his own healthy cheek by way of pattern. “I want more sun to shine upon you.”
Neville drooped suddenly as he replied in a lowered voice: “I am not hardy enough for that, yet. I may become so, but I cannot bear it yet. If you had gone through those Cloisterham streets as I did; if you had seen, as I did, those averted eyes, and the better sort of people silently giving me too much room to pass, that I might not touch them or come near them, you wouldn’t think it quite unreasonable that I cannot go about in the daylight.”
“My poor fellow!” said the Minor Canon, in a tone so purely sympathetic that the young man caught his hand, “I never said it was unreasonable; never thought so. But I should like you to do it.”
“And that would give me the strongest motive to do it. But I cannot yet. I cannot persuade myself that the eyes of even the stream of strangers I pass in this vast city look at me without suspicion. I feel marked and tainted, even when I go out—as I do only—at night. But the darkness covers me then, and I take courage from it.”
Mr. Crisparkle laid a hand upon his shoulder, and stood looking down at him.