took her arm, protecting her from the traffic, freeing it
directly they reached the pavement. Inwardly she thrilled, even at
the slight touch of his hand on her elbow. She had never been quite
so happy before. Nothing needed explanation. She defined no
sensation to herself. When the sun first bursts in April after the
leaden winter skies, you bask in it, drench yourself in the fluid
of its light, and ask no questions. It is only the smallest natures
that are not content with the moment that is absolute.

But in the mind of Traill, there swung a ponderous balance that could
not find its equilibrium. She had called him a gentleman; was he going
to act as one? Into her side of the scale, with both her little hands,
she had thrown in her implicit confidence. Was there any weight on
his side which he could put in to equalize? He hunted through his
intentions as the goldsmith hunts amongst his drachms and his
counterpoises; but he found nothing that could balance the massive
quality of her faith--nothing!

In his most emotional dreams of women, he had never conceived himself
in the drab light of the married man. Possibly because he had never
moved amongst that class of women with whom intimacy is obtained only
through the sanction of a binding sacrament. His contempt of the
society to which his birth gave him right of entrance, had always
kept him apart from them. But he scarcely saw the matter in that
breadth of light. Intimacy with the women he had known had always
been possible--possible in its various degrees, some more difficult
to arrive at than others, but always possible. And, until that moment,
when Sally had told him that she knew he was a gentleman, he had placed
her no differently to the rest. Cheap, sordid seduction, there had
been none of that in his mind; but he had tacitly admitted within
himself that if their acquaintance were to drift--she willing, he
content--into that condition of intimacy, then what harm would be
done? She was a little type-writer; he, a man, amongst other men.
A thousand women pass through the fire that way and come out little
the worse.

So had he assessed her, until that moment when she had unthinkingly,
unhesitatingly accepted his invitation to come and see him in his
rooms. He had thought it innocence, he had imagined it a purity of
mind that, in a city such as this, was almost unthinkable. It was
his better nature then that had prompted the warning, the opening
of a kitten's eye