is favourite stories, when she saw, by the
smoothing out of his mouth and the sudden serenity of his eyes, that he
was going to give her the delicious but not wholly reassuring shock of
being a good boy.

Thoughtfully he examined her face as she knelt down beside the cot; then
he poked out a finger and pressed it on her tearful cheek.

"Poor Susy got a pain too," he said, putting his arms about her; and
as she hugged him close, he added philosophically: "Tell Geordie a new
story, darling, and you'll forget all about it."

XXVI

NICK Lansing arrived in Paris two days after his lawyer had announced
his coming to Mr. Spearman.

He had left Rome with the definite purpose of freeing himself and Susy;
and though he was not pledged to Coral Hicks he had not concealed from
her the object of his journey. In vain had he tried to rouse in himself
any sense of interest in his own future. Beyond the need of reaching a
definite point in his relation to Susy his imagination could not travel.
But he had been moved by Coral's confession, and his reason told him
that he and she would probably be happy together, with the temperate
happiness based on a community of tastes and an enlargement of
opportunities. He meant, on his return to Rome, to ask her to marry
him; and he knew that she knew it. Indeed, if he had not spoken before
leaving it was with no idea of evading his fate, or keeping her longer
in suspense, but simply because of the strange apathy that had fallen
on him since he had received Susy's letter. In his incessant
self-communings he dressed up this apathy as a discretion which forbade
his engaging Coral's future till his own was assured. But in truth he
knew that Coral's future was already engaged, and his with it: in Rome
the fact had seemed natural and even inevitable.

In Paris, it instantly became the thinnest of unrealities. Not because
Paris was not Rome, nor because it was Paris; but because hidden away
somewhere in that vast unheeding labyrinth was the half-forgotten part
of himself that was Susy.... For weeks, for months past, his mind had
been saturated with Susy: she had never seemed more insistently near him
than as their separation lengthened, and the chance of reunion became
less probable. It was as if a sickness long smouldering in him had
broken out and become acute, enveloping him in the Nessus-shirt of his
memories. There were moments when, to his memory, their actual embraces
seemed perfunctory,