most decidedly it was
not his. His business, as far as he could see it, was simply to
withdraw as gracefully as possible from a position so difficult to
occupy with any decency.

He must then make another attempt to back out of it. No doubt it would
be an uncommonly awkward thing to do. The lady had already shown a
very pretty little will of her own, and supposing she insisted on
holding him to his bargain? There was that estimate, too; it seemed to
have clinched things, somehow, between him and Miss Harden. He did not
exactly know how to deal with that high-handed innocence, but he would
ask her to allow him to re-consider it.

He approached her with his head tossed up a little more than usual,
his way when he was about to do something disagreeable, to drive a
bargain or to ask a favour.

"Miss Harden, may I speak to you one moment?"

She looked up. Her face and figure were radiant in the light from the
south window.

"What is it?" she asked.

She was busy at one of the bookcases with a note-book and pencil,
cataloguing on an absurd but independent plan of her own. He gave a
rueful glance at her.

"I'm not sure that I ought to have let you engage me last night. I
wonder if I might ask you--"

"To release you from your engagement?"

"You must think I'm behaving very badly."

She did not contradict him; neither did she assent. She held him for
the moment under her long penetrating gaze. Her eyes were not of the
detective sort, quick to penetrate disguises. They were (though she
did not know it) eyes that possessed the power of spiritual seduction,
luring souls to confession. Your falseness might escape them; but if
there was any truth in you, she compelled you to be true.

She compelled Rickman to be impulsive.

"I'd give anything to know what I ought to do."

She did not help him out.

"I can't make up my mind about this work."

"Is it the question of time? I thought we had made that clear? You
didn't undertake to finish by the twenty-seventh."

"The question is whether I should have undertaken it at all."

"It might have been as well to have answered that question first."

"I couldn't answer it. There were so many things--"

"Do you want a longer time in town?"

"I want a longer time here, to think it over, to make up my mind
whether I can go on--"

"And in the meanwhile?"

"The work goes on just the same."

"And if you decide that you can't continue it?"

"I should find a substitute."