must talk to
me." He could feel her heart beat, he could feel her shiver as she
clung.

"Yes," she said very low; "yes, I promise--but not now."

"No," he said, "not now. I want to be happy as long as I can." She
started away, and he felt her look at him in the dark.

"You'll be happier when I've told you," she said.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because I shall be happier myself then," she said; and James hoped
that she was right about him. One thing amazed him to discover--how
women imputed their own virtues to the men they loved. It struck him a
mortal blow to realise that his evident happiness would give Lucy
joy, whereas hers would by no means necessarily add to his. "What does
give me happiness, then?" he asked himself; "what could conceivably
increase my zest for life? Evidence of power, exercise of faculty: so
far as I know, nothing else whatever. A parlous state of affairs. But
it is the difference, I presume, between a giving creature and a
getting one which explains all. Is a man, then, never to give, and be
happy? Has he ever tried? Is a woman not to get? Has she ever had a
chance of it?" He puzzled over these things in his prosaic, methodical
way. One thing was clear to everybody there but Urquhart in his
present fatuity: Lucy was thriving. She had colour, light in her eyes,
a bloom upon her, a dewiness, an auroral air. She sunned herself like
a bird in the dust; she bathed her body, and tired herself with long
mountain and woodland walks. When she was alone with her husband she
grew as sentimental as a housemaid and as little heedful of the
absurd. She grew young and amazingly pretty, the sister of her son. It
would be untrue to say that, being in clover, she was unaware of it.
For a woman of one-and-thirty to have her husband for a lover, and her
lover for a foil, is a gift of the gods. So she took it--with the sun
and green water, and wine-bright air. Let the moralists battle it out
with the sophists: it did her a world of good.

CHAPTER XIX

THE MOON-SPELL

Macartney fell easily into habits, and was slow to renounce them.
Having got into the way of making love to his wife, he by no means
abandoned it; at the same time, and in as easy a fashion, it came to
be a matter of routine with him to play piquet with Vera Nugent after
dinner. It was she who had proposed it, despairing of a quartette, or
even of a trio, for the Bridge which was a dram to her. Here also
James would have been only too