e makes no effort to do it."

He stopped again beside the table. "And do you suppose he would? When
you've prepared your ambush cleverly enough you don't have to go out and
drag your victim into it. You've only to lie still and he'll walk in of
his own accord."

"Of course I see that."

"Well, what then?"

She threw him a glance over her shoulder. To do so it was necessary for
her to turn her head both sidewise and upward, so that he got the
exquisite lines of the neck and profile, the mysterious gray-green tint
of the eyes, and the coppery gleam of her hair. The appeal to his senses
and to something beyond his senses made him gasp. It made him tremble.
"My God, what a wife for _me_!" he was saying to himself. "She's got the
pluck of a Jeanne d'Arc and the nerve of a Christian martyr."

"Well, then," she said, in answer to his words--"then I don't have to
walk into the ambush--unless I want to."

"Does that mean that there are conceivable conditions in which you might
want to?"

She turned completely round in her chair. Both hands, with fingers
interlaced, rested on the table as she looked up at him.

"I shall have to let you find your own reply to that."

"But you know he's in love with you."

"I know he was in love with me once. I've no absolute reason to think
that he is so still."

"But supposing he was? Would it make any difference to you?"

"Would it make any difference to _you?_"

"It would make the difference--"

He stopped in confusion. While he was not clear as to what he was going
to say, he was startled by the possibilities before him. The one thing
plain was that her question, simple as it seemed, gave an entirely new
turn to the conversation. It called on him to take the lead, and put
him, neatly and skilfully, in the one place of all others which--had he
descried it in advance--he would have been eager to avoid. Would it make
any difference to him? What difference _could_ it make? What difference
_must_ it make?

It was one of those moments which occur from time to time when a man of
honor must speak first and reflect afterward--just as at the heights of
Dargal he had had to risk his life for Private Vickerson's, without
debating as to which of them, in the general economy of lives, could the
more easily be spared.

"It would make the difference--"

He stopped again. It was a great deal to say. Once he had said it there
could be no reconsideration. Reconsideration would be worse than