ly that the nails bit the palms. She breathed only at considerable
intervals, with short, quick inhalations.

Yet the act which caused this extraordinary revulsion of feeling had
not been the result of any sudden impulse. It was the execution of a
deliberate resolve which had originated in her mind on the night of Lucy
Merritt's departure, as she sat with her before the fire, listening to
her fanciful talk about the advantages which might be expected to attend
franker relations in love affairs between men and women. Deeply in love,
and at the same time feeling that in the ordinary course of events she
had nothing but disappointment to look forward to, she was in a state
of mind just desperate enough to catch at the idea that if Arthur Burton
knew of her love, there would be some chance of his returning it. It
seemed to her that if he did not, she could be no worse off than she
was already. She had brooded over the subject day and night ever since,
considering from every point of view of abstract right or true feminine
propriety the question whether a woman might, without real prejudice to
her maidenly modesty, tell a man that she cared for him, without waiting
for him to ask her to marry him. Her conclusion had been that there was
no reason, apart from her own feelings, why any woman, who dared do it,
should not; and if she thought her life's happiness dependent on her
doing it, that she would be a weak creature who did not dare.

Her resolve once taken, she had only waited an opportunity to carry it
out; and that evening, when Arthur offered to walk home with her,
she felt that the opportunity had come. Little wonder that she came
downstairs from the dressing-room looking remarkably pale, and that
after they had started, and she was trying to screw up her courage to
the speaking point, her responses to his conversational efforts should
have been at random. It was terribly hard work, this screwing up
her courage. All the fine arguments which had convinced her that her
intended course was justifiable and right had utterly collapsed. She
could not recall one of them. What she had undertaken to do seemed
shocking, hateful, immodest, scandalous, impossible. But there was a
bed-rock of determination to her character; and a fixed, dogged resolve
to do the thing she had once made up her mind to, come what might, had
not permitted her to draw back. Hardly knowing what she was about, or
the words she was saying, she had plunged