he keeper's daughter."

"_Vox populi, vox Dei_; they're both so hard to understand."

"I've been longing for you," she said, seeming to awake suddenly from her
half-dreamy half-playful account of the life she had been living. The
speech, with its cruel frankness and its more cruel affection, embittered
him.

"When you're tired of a rosy apple, you like a bite at a bitter cherry?
One bite; the rest of me, I suppose, is only to dress the table."

She understood him.

"Well, then, you shouldn't come," she protested. "I've been fair about
it."

"No, not always; what you write and say now and then isn't fair unless it
means something more."

"Oh, I don't know what it means."

Her misery drove away his resentment, and pity filled its place.

"You seem more than usually down on your luck," he said with a smile.

"Yes, a little," she confessed. "It's the Mildmays and--and--the general
sham of it, you know." She glanced across at him, smiling. "That's why I
longed for you," she said.

It seemed to him that never had fate and never had woman been so cruel.
The one so nearly had given what he wanted, the other tantalised with the
exhibition of a feeling only just short of what he hoped for, but the
more merciless because it seemed not to understand by how narrow an inch
it failed of his desires. He spoke to her hardly and coldly.

"You seem to me to choose to try a bit of everything and a bit of
everybody," he said. "That's your affair. But I'm not surprised that you
don't find it satisfactory."

"I have to try more than I like of some things and some people," she
replied. She went on quickly, "I know, oh, I know! Now you're calling me
disloyal!"

A curious vexation laid hold of him. Once he had liked her to speak of
him in this strain, even as once he had loved to see in her the type of
the pure, calm, gracious maiden. Now he knew better both her and himself.
The impulse was on him to say that he cared nothing for her disloyalty so
that he himself was the cause of it and he himself to reap the benefit.
He was quick to read her, and he read in her restless misery some sore
discontent with the lot that she had chosen. But he refrained from the
words, not in his turn from any loyalty, but rather still from
bitterness, from a perverse desire to give her nothing of what she had
refused, to leave her in the solitude of spirit which came of her own
action. Besides his fastidiousness revolted from plunging him into a
po