so that pin-pricks would draw blood from it; and from the
first of her acquaintance with him, and of her having to defend herself
against a certain air that he had of knowing better what was good for
her than she knew herself, she had recognised the fact that perfect
frankness was her best weapon. To attempt to spare his sensibility or to
escape from him edgewise, as one might do from a man who had barred
the way less sturdily--this, in dealing with Caspar Goodwood, who would
grasp at everything of every sort that one might give him, was wasted
agility. It was not that he had not susceptibilities, but his passive
surface, as well as his active, was large and hard, and he might always
be trusted to dress his wounds, so far as they required it, himself. She
came back, even for her measure of possible pangs and aches in him,
to her old sense that he was naturally plated and steeled, armed
essentially for aggression.

"I can't reconcile myself to that," he simply said. There was a
dangerous liberality about it; for she felt how open it was to him to
make the point that he had not always disgusted her.

"I can't reconcile myself to it either, and it's not the state of things
that ought to exist between us. If you'd only try to banish me from your
mind for a few months we should be on good terms again."

"I see. If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time,
I should find I could keep it up indefinitely."

"Indefinitely is more than I ask. It's more even than I should like."

"You know that what you ask is impossible," said the young man, taking
his adjective for granted in a manner she found irritating.

"Aren't you capable of making a calculated effort?" she demanded.
"You're strong for everything else; why shouldn't you be strong for
that?"

"An effort calculated for what?" And then as she hung fire, "I'm
capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being
infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more
strongly."

"There's a good deal in that;" and indeed our young lady felt the
force of it--felt it thrown off, into the vast of truth and poetry,
as practically a bait to her imagination. But she promptly came round.
"Think of me or not, as you find most possible; only leave me alone."

"Until when?"

"Well, for a year or two."

"Which do you mean? Between one year and two there's all the difference
in the world."

"Call it two then," said Isabel with