ould withhold
them from her searching gaze. There was a short pause.

"Don't speak like that," she said at last. "It isn't your way, and I know
you too well--we know one another too well--to be anything but sincere. You
owe me something, too, and if I forbear you should understand why."

"I owe you something, do I?" he asked. "What do I owe you?"

Mrs. Rosscott caught her under lip in her teeth.

"You gave me a promise, Mr. Denham," she said, quite low, but most
distinctly--"a promise which you broke."

Jack flushed; his eyelids drooped for a minute.

"I didn't break it," he said. "I gave it up."

"Is there any difference?"

"A great difference."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Do you want to have the truth?" he said. "If you really do, I'll tell
you. But I don't ask to tell you, recollect, and if I were you I'd drop
the whole--I certainly would.--If I were you."

She looked at him in astonishment.

"I don't understand," she said. "Tell me what you mean."

He raised his hand to his bandaged head again.

"I think," he said, fighting hard to speak with utter indifference, "I
think that it would have been better if you had told me about Holloway."

At that her big eyes opened widely.

"What should I tell you about Mr. Holloway?" she asked. "What could I tell
you about him?"

"It isn't any use speaking like that," he said; and with the words he
suddenly leaped from his chair and began to plunge back and forth across
the small room. "You see I'm not a boy any more. I've come to my senses. I
know now! I understand now! It's all plain to me now. Now and always. I've
been fooled once but only once and by All that Is, I never will be fooled
again. Your're pretty and awfully fascinating, and it's always fun for the
woman--especially if she knows all her bets are safely hedged. And I was so
completely done up that I was even more sport than the common run, I
suppose; but--" she was staring at him in unfeigned amazement, and he was
lashing himself to fury with the feelings that underlaid his words--"but
even if you made it all right with yourself by calling your share by the
name of 'having a good influence' over me (I know that's how married women
always pat themselves on the back while they're sending us to the devil),
even then, I think that it would have been better to have been fair and
square with me. It would have been better all round. I'd have been left
with some belief in--in people. As it is, when I saw