t she had been ten times more foolish. Her mind had refused
to dwell upon Kitty's dreadful suggestions, because they were
dreadful. Unconscious of her sex, she had remained unconscious of her
power; she had trusted (unconsciously) to the power of another woman
for protection. Flossie had, so to speak, detached and absorbed the
passionate part of Keith Rickman; by which process the rest of him was
left subtler and more pure. She had thought she could really deal with
him now as a disembodied spirit. And so under the shelter of his
engagement she had, after her own manner, let herself go.

These thoughts swept through her brain like one thought, as she
contemplated the misery she had made. They came with the surging of
the blood in her cheeks, so swiftly that she had no time to see that
they hardly exhausted the aspects of her case. And it was not her own
case that she was thinking of.

She turned to him pleading. "Don't you see that I could never forgive
myself if I thought that I had hurt her? You are not going to make me
so unhappy?"

"Do you mean, am I going to marry her?"

She said nothing; for she was conscious now, conscious and ashamed of
using a power that she had no right to have; ashamed, too, of being
forced to acknowledge the truth of the thing she had so passionately
denied.

"You needn't be afraid," he said. "Of course I am going to marry her."

He turned away from her as he had turned away five years ago, with the
same hopeless sense of dishonour and defeat. She called him back, as
she had called him back five years ago, and for the same purpose, of
delivering a final stab. Only that this time she knew it was a stab;
and her own heart felt the pain as she delivered it.

But the terrible thing had to be done. She had got to return the
manuscript, the gift that should never have been given. She gathered
the loosened sheets tenderly, like things that she was grieved to part
from. He admitted that she was handling her sword with all gentleness
so as to avoid as far as possible any suggestion of a thrust.

"You must take them back," she said. "I can't keep them--or--or have
anything to do with them after what you told me. I should feel as if
I'd taken what belonged to some one else."

As he took the sheets from her and pocketed them, she felt that again
he was pocketing an insult as well as a stab.

But the victim was no longer an inexperienced youth. So he smiled
valorously, as beseemed his manhood