surprise. And, if you ask me, I should say he'd take it
hard. Are you going to risk that?"

He was returning to his point even when he feigned to have lost sight of
it. Tortured and panting she evaded it with pitiful subterfuges. He
urged her back, pressing her tender breast against the prick of it.

"I'm going to risk everything," she said.

"Risk it, risk it, then. Tie yourself for life to a man you don't know;
who doesn't really know you, though you think he does; who on your own
showing wouldn't marry you if he did know. You see what a whopping big
risk it is, for he's bound to know in the end."

She sickened and wearied. "He is not bound to know. Why is he?"

"Because, my dear girl, you're bound to give yourself away some day.
I know you. I know the perverse little devil that is in you. When
you realise what you've let yourself in for you'll break loose,
suddenly--like that." He threw out his arms as if he burst bonds
asunder. "You can't help yourself. You simply can't live the life.
You may yearn for it, but you can't live it."

"I don't want to be respectable. It isn't that."

"What is it then?"

"Can't you see?"

He looked at her closely, as if he saw it for the first time.

"Are you so awfully gone on him?"

"Yes," she said. "You _won't_ tell him? It'll kill me if he knows."

"You think it will, but it won't."

"I shall kill myself, then."

"Oh no, you won't. You only think you will. It's Lucy I'm sorry for."

"And it's me you're hard on. You were always hard. You say you condone
things, but you condone nothing, and you're not good yourself."

"No, I'm not good myself. But there is conduct and conduct. I can
condone everything but the fraud you're practising on this innocent
man." He rose. "It's--well--you see, it's such a beastly shame."

It was to be a battle of brains, and she had foiled him with the
indomitable stupidity of her passion. But his point--the one point that
he stuck to--was a sword point for her passion.

"You won't tell him? You won't? It would be a blackguardly thing to do."

"If Lucy was a friend of mine I'm afraid the blackguardly thing would
be to hold my tongue."

"You'd tell him then?" she said. "You wouldn't think of me?"

She came to him. She laid her arms upon his shoulders. Her hands touched
him with dispassionate, deliberate, ineffectual caresses, a pitiful
return to a discarded manner, an outrageous imitation of the old
professional cajoleries. It was so p