d. I know enough, however, of your
probable attitude. You needn't try to express it. It's enough that your
sincerity gives me the right to ask a favour of you--to make an intense,
a solemn request."

"Make it; I listen."

"DON'T DISAPPOINT ME. If you don't understand me now you will to-morrow
or very soon. When I said just now that I had a high opinion of you,
you see I meant it very seriously," she explained. "It wasn't a vain
compliment. I believe there's no appeal one may make to your generosity
that can remain long unanswered. If this were to happen--if I were to
find you selfish where I thought you generous, narrow where I thought
you large"--and she spoke slowly, her voice lingering with all emphasis
on each of these words--"vulgar where I thought you rare, I should think
worse of human nature. I should take it, I assure you, very hard indeed.
I should say to myself in the dull days of the future: 'There was ONE
man who might have done so and so, and he too failed.' But this shan't
be. You've made too good an impression on me not to make the very best.
If you wish to please me for ever there's a way."

She was standing close to him, with her dress touching him, her
eyes fixed on his. As she went on her tone became, to his sense,
extraordinary, and she offered the odd spectacle of a beautiful woman
preaching reason with the most communicative and irresistible passion.
Longmore was dazzled, but mystified and bewildered. The intention of
her words was all remonstrance, refusal, dismissal, but her presence
and effect there, so close, so urgent, so personal, a distracting
contradiction of it. She had never been so lovely. In her white dress,
with her pale face and deeply-lighted brow, she seemed the very spirit
of the summer night. When she had ceased speaking she drew a long
breath; he felt it on his cheek, and it stirred in his whole being
a sudden perverse imagination. Were not her words, in their high
impossible rigour, a mere challenge to his sincerity, a mere precaution
of her pride, meant to throw into relief her almost ghostly beauty, and
wasn't this the only truth, the only law, the only thing to take account
of?

He closed his eyes and felt her watch him not without pain and
perplexity herself. He looked at her again, met her own eyes and saw
them fill with strange tears. Then this last sophistry of his great
desire for her knew itself touched as a bubble is pricked; it died away
with a stifled murmur, a