ade her believe that he loved her, and had made her
love him too. Clare remembered the desperate little sob, and the
handkerchief twice pressed to the pale lips. The woman was married, and
yet she actually loved the man enough to think of divorcing her husband
in order to marry him. Then, just when she was ready, he had turned and
told her in the most heartless way that it had been all play, and that
he would not marry her under any circumstances. It seemed monstrous to
the innocent girl that they should even have spoken of marriage, until
the divorce was accomplished. Then, of course, it would have been all
right. Clare had been brought up with modern ideas about divorce in
general, as being a fair and just thing in certain circumstances. She
had learned that it could not be right to let an innocent woman suffer
all her life because she had married a brute by mistake. Doubtless that
was Lady Fan's case. But she should have got her divorce first, and then
she might have talked of marriage afterwards. It was very wrong of her.

But Lady Fan's thoughtlessness--or wickedness, as Clare thought she
ought to call it--sank into insignificance before the cynical
heartlessness of the man. It was impossible ever to forget the cool way
in which he had said she ought not to take it so tragically, because it
was not worth it. Yet he had admitted that he had promised to marry her
if she got a divorce. He had made love to her, there on the Acropolis,
at sunset, as she had said. He even granted that he might have believed
himself in earnest for a few moments. And now he told her that he was
sorry, but that "it would not do." It had evidently been all his fault,
for he had found nothing with which to reproach her. If there had been
anything, Clare thought, he would have brought it up in self-defence.
She could not suspect that he would almost rather have married Lady Fan,
and ruined his life, than have done that. Innocence cannot even guess at
sin's code of honour--though sometimes it would be in evil case without
it. Brook had probably broken Lady Fan's heart that night, thought the
young girl, though Lady Fan had said with such a bitter, crying laugh
that they were not children and that their hearts could not break.

And it all seemed very unreal, as she looked back upon it. The situation
was certainly romantic, but the words had been poor beyond her
imagination, and the actors had halted in their parts, as at a first
rehearsal.

Th