y circumstances you would
have owed him fifteen pounds. But even he wouldn't take it now. I
think he considers himself quite sufficiently paid."

"You are mixing up two things that are absolutely distinct."

"No. I'm only refusing to be mixed up with them."

"But you are mixed up with them."

He laughed at that shot, as a brave man laughs at a hurt.

"You needn't remind me of that. I meant--any more than I can help;
though it may seem to you that I haven't very much lower to sink."

"Believe me, I don't associate you with this wretched business. I want
you to forget it."

"I can't forget it. If I could, it would only be by refusing to
degrade myself further in connection with it."

His words were clumsy and wild as the hasty terrified movements of a
naked soul, trying to gather round it the last rags of decency and
honour.

"There is no connection," she added, more gently than ever, seeing how
she hurt him. "Don't you see that it lies between you and me?"

He saw that as she spoke she was curling the cheque into a convenient
form for slipping into his hand in the moment of leave-taking.

"Indeed--indeed you must," she whispered.

He drew back sharply.

"Miss Harden, won't you leave me a shred of self-respect?"

"And what about mine?" said she.

It was too much even for chivalry to bear.

"That's not exactly my affair, is it?"

He hardly realised the full significance of his answer, but he deemed
it apt. If, as she had been so careful to point out to him, her honour
and his moved on different planes, how could her self-respect be his
affair?

"It ought to be," she murmured in a tone whose sweetness should have
been a salve to any wound. But he did not perceive its meaning any
more than he had perceived his own, being still blinded by what seemed
to him the cruelty and degradation of the final blow.

She had stripped him; then she stabbed.

To hide his shame and his hurt, he turned his face from her and left
her. So strangely and so drunkenly did he go, with such a mist in his
eyes, and such anguish and fury in his heart and brain, that on the
threshold of the Harden library he stumbled past Miss Palliser without
seeing her.

She found Lucia standing where he had left her, looking at a little
roll of pale green paper that her fingers curled and uncurled.

"Lucia," she said, "what have you done to him?"

Lucia let the little roll of paper fall from her fingers to the floor.

"I don't know, Ki