he same I'd made up my mind to do it that morning--when the
telegram came. That stopped me."

"You were well out of it. You don't know what an awful thing it would
have been to do. She worshipped her father. Is this what you've been
making yourself ill about?"

"I suppose so. You know how adorably kind she was to me?"

"I can guess. She is adorably kind to every one," said Kitty, gentle
but astute.

"And, you see, I've behaved dishonourably to her."

"No. I don't see that."

"Don't you? Don't you? Why, my father sent me partly as his agent, and
all the time she believed I was only working for her."

"Did you behave as your father's agent?"

"No. But I let her slave from morning till night over that catalogue."

"Which she would have done in any case."

"Don't you see that I ought to have backed out of it altogether, in
the very beginning?"

"Ah yes--if everybody did what they ought."

"I tried twice, but it was no good. I suppose I didn't try hard
enough."

"What good would you have done by going, if she wanted you to stay?"

"That's how I argued. But the fact is, I stayed because I couldn't go
away. Of course, it was an abominable position, but I assure you it
felt like heaven when it didn't feel like 'ell."

His anguish, mercifully, was too great for him to feel the horror of
his lapse. And Kitty hardly noticed it; at any rate she never felt the
smallest inclination to smile, not even in recalling it afterwards.

It was, if you came to think of it, an unusual, a remarkable
confession. But she remembered that he had had a nervous fever; it was
his nerves, then, and his fever that had cried out, a cry covered,
made decent almost, by the clangour of the sea.

She wondered how it came that, when her mind was as full as it could
be of Lucia and her affairs, it could give such concentrated attention
to him and his. If he had been what the tortoiseshell eye-glass took
him for, a common man, it ought to have been easy and natural to
dismiss him. But she could not dismiss him. There was some force in
him, not consciously exerted, which held her there on that conspicuous
seat beside him under the gaze of the tortoiseshell eye-glass. Kitty
was by no means deficient in what she had called "profane fancy," and
she felt to her finger tips that she was making a spectacle of herself
at the end of the esplanade. Their backs at this moment she knew must
be standing out very clear and bold against the sky-line. But