daring speech, but
she sat quite still, looking at him steadily. She had taken off her
gloves, and her hands lay lightly, one resting on the other.

"You mean, I might have married you."

"I'm not worth much, but at least I could never have betrayed the white
angel in you."

She leaned towards him and spoke earnestly, almost like a child to an
older person in whom it has faith.

"Do you think such an angel could do anything in--in this sort of
world?"

"Modern London?"

She nodded, keeping her eyes still on him. He guessed at once of what
she was thinking.

"Do anything--is rather vague," he replied evasively. "What sort of
thing?"

Suddenly she threw off all reserve and let her temper go.

"If an angel were striving with a common American, do you mean to tell
me you don't know which would go to the wall in our world?" she cried.
"Robin, you may be a thousand things, but you aren't a fool. Nor am
I--not _au fond_. And yet I have thought--I have wondered--"

She stopped.

"What?" he asked.

"Whether, if there is an angel in me, it mightn't be as well to trot it
out."

The self-consciousness of the slang prevented him from hating it.

"Ah!" he said. "When have you wondered?"

"Lately. It's your fault. You have insisted so much upon the existence
of the celestial being that at last I've become almost credulous. It's
very absurd and I'm still hanging back."

"Call credulity belief and you needn't be ashamed of it."

"And if I believe, what then?"

"Then a thousand things. Belief sheds strength through all the tissues
of the mind, the heart, the temperament. Disbelief sheds weakness. The
one knits together, the other dissolves."

"There are people who think angels frightfully boring company."

"I know."

"Well then?"

Suddenly Robin got up and spoke almost brutally.

"Do you think I don't see that you are trying to find out from me what I
think would be the best means of--"

The look in her face stopped him.

"I think the water is boiling," he said, going over to the lamp.

"It ought to bubble," she answered quietly.

He lifted up the lid of the silver bowl and peeped in.

"It is bubbling."

For a moment he was busy pouring the water into the teapot. While he did
this there was a silence between them. Lady Holme got up from the sofa
and walked about the room. When she came to the "_Danseuse de Tunisie_"
she stopped in front of it.

"How strange that fan is," she said.

Robin shut t