this answer contained a germ of injustice, she
added, even more kindly: "Not that I don't appreciate your kindness--that
I'm not grateful for it. But a business arrangement between us would in
any case be impossible, because I shall have no security to give when my
debt to Gus Trenor has been paid."

Rosedale received this statement in silence: he seemed to feel the note
of finality in her voice, yet to be unable to accept it as closing the
question between them.

In the silence Lily had a clear perception of what was passing through
his mind. Whatever perplexity he felt as to the inexorableness of her
course--however little he penetrated its motive--she saw that it
unmistakably tended to strengthen her hold over him. It was as though the
sense in her of unexplained scruples and resistances had the same
attraction as the delicacy of feature, the fastidiousness of manner,
which gave her an external rarity, an air of being impossible to match.
As he advanced in social experience this uniqueness had acquired a
greater value for him, as though he were a collector who had learned to
distinguish minor differences of design and quality in some long-coveted
object.

Lily, perceiving all this, understood that he would marry her at once, on
the sole condition of a reconciliation with Mrs. Dorset; and the
temptation was the less easy to put aside because, little by little,
circumstances were breaking down her dislike for Rosedale. The dislike,
indeed, still subsisted; but it was penetrated here and there by the
perception of mitigating qualities in him: of a certain gross kindliness,
a rather helpless fidelity of sentiment, which seemed to be struggling
through the hard surface of his material ambitions.

Reading his dismissal in her eyes, he held out his hand with a gesture
which conveyed something of this inarticulate conflict.

"If you'd only let me, I'd set you up over them all--I'd put you where
you could wipe your feet on 'em!" he declared; and it touched her oddly
to see that his new passion had not altered his old standard of values.

Lily took no sleeping-drops that night. She lay awake viewing her
situation in the crude light which Rosedale's visit had shed on it. In
fending off the offer he was so plainly ready to renew, had she not
sacrificed to one of those abstract notions of honour that might be
called the conventionalities of the moral life? What debt did she owe to
a social order which had condemned and