"Forgive me in turn for my inquisitiveness," he said.
"What does she say to your suit?"

Erskine hesitated, showing by his manner that he thought Trefusis had no
right to ask the question. "She says nothing," he answered.

"Hm!" said Trefusis. "Well, you may rely on me as to the train. There is
my hand upon it."

"Thank you," said Erskine fervently. They shook hands and parted,
Trefusis walking away with a grin suggestive of anything but good faith.

CHAPTER XVII

Gertrude, unaware of the extent to which she had already betrayed her
disappointment, believed that anxiety for her father's health, which she
alleged as the motive of her sudden departure, was an excuse plausible
enough to blind her friends to her overpowering reluctance to speak to
Agatha or endure her presence; to her fierce shrinking from the sort of
pity usually accorded to a jilted woman; and, above all, to her dread
of meeting Trefusis. She had for some time past thought of him as an
upright and perfect man deeply interested in her. Yet, comparatively
liberal as her education had been, she had no idea of any interest
of man in woman existing apart from a desire to marry. He had, in his
serious moments, striven to make her sensible of the baseness he saw in
her worldliness, flattering her by his apparent conviction--which
she shared--that she was capable of a higher life. Almost in the same
breath, a strain of gallantry which was incorrigible in him, and to
which his humor and his tenderness to women whom he liked gave variety
and charm, would supervene upon his seriousness with a rapidity which
her far less flexible temperament could not follow. Hence she, thinking
him still in earnest when he had swerved into florid romance, had been
dangerously misled. He had no conscientious scruples in his love-making,
because he was unaccustomed to consider himself as likely to inspire
love in women; and Gertrude did not know that her beauty gave to an hour
spent alone with her a transient charm which few men of imagination and
address could resist. She, who had lived in the marriage market since
she had left school, looked upon love-making as the most serious
business of life. To him it was only a pleasant sort of trifling,
enhanced by a dash of sadness in the reflection that it meant so little.

Of the ceremonies attending her departure, the one that cost her most
was the kiss she felt bound to offer Agatha. She had been jealous of her
at college, wher