d to put it right. I liked
it, so you needn't think anything of that. But if you persist in your
refusal all my hard work goes for nothing." He was so powerless
against her tender obstinacy that he had determined to appeal to her
tenderness alone. "There were about three years of it, the best three
years out of my life; and you are going to fling them away and make
them useless. All for a little wretched scruple. This is the only
argument that will appeal to you; or I wouldn't have mentioned it."

"The best years out of your life--why were they the best?"

"Because they were the first in which I was free."

She thought of the time nine years ago when she had taken from him
three days, the only days when he was free, and how she had tried to
make restitution and had failed. "And whatever else I refuse," she
said, "I've taken _them_? I can't get out of that?"

"No. If you want to be very cruel you can say I'd no business to lay
you under the obligation, but you can't get out of it."

She looked away. Did she want to be very cruel? Did she want to get
out of it? Might it not rather be happiness to be in it, immersed in
it? Lost in it, with all her scruples and all her pride?

His voice broke and trembled into passion. "And what is it that I'm
asking you to take? Something that isn't mine and _is_ yours;
something that it would be dishonourable of me to keep. But if it
_was_ mine, it would be a little thing compared with what I wanted to
give you and you wouldn't have."

Her hands in her distress had fallen to their old unconscious trick of
stroking and caressing the thing they held, the one thing that he had
given her, that she had not refused. His eyes followed her movements.
She looked up and saw the jealous hunger in them.

She saw too, through his loose thin suit, that the lines of his body
were sharper than ever. His face was more than ever serious and clean
cut; his eyes were more than ever sunk under the shadow of his brows,
darkening their blue. He was refined almost to emaciation. And she saw
other things. As he sat there, with one leg crooked over the other,
his wrists stretched out, his hands clasped, nursing his knee, she
noticed that his cuffs, though clean, were frayed; that his coat was
worn in places; that his boots were patched and broken at the sole. He
changed his attitude suddenly when he became aware of her gaze. She
did not know why she had not noticed these details before, nor why she
notice