yes"--she accepted the proposition. "But for myself,"
she added, "the question is what YOU make."

"Ah I make nothing. It's not my affair."

"I beg your pardon. It's just there that, since you've taken it up and
are committed to it, it most intensely becomes yours. You're not
saving me, I take it, for your interest in myself, but for your
interest in our friend. The one's at any rate wholly dependent on the
other. You can't in honour not see me through," she wound up, "because
you can't in honour not see HIM."

Strange and beautiful to him was her quiet soft acuteness. The thing
that most moved him was really that she was so deeply serious. She had
none of the portentous forms of it, but he had never come in contact,
it struck him, with a force brought to so fine a head. Mrs. Newsome,
goodness knew, was serious; but it was nothing to this. He took it all
in, he saw it all together. "No," he mused, "I can't in honour not see
him."

Her face affected him as with an exquisite light. "You WILL then?"

"I will."

At this she pushed back her chair and was the next moment on her feet.
"Thank you!" she said with her hand held out to him across the table
and with no less a meaning in the words than her lips had so
particularly given them after Chad's dinner. The golden nail she had
then driven in pierced a good inch deeper. Yet he reflected that he
himself had only meanwhile done what he had made up his mind to on the
same occasion. So far as the essence of the matter went he had simply
stood fast on the spot on which he had then planted his feet.

II

He received three days after this a communication from America, in the
form of a scrap of blue paper folded and gummed, not reaching him
through his bankers, but delivered at his hotel by a small boy in
uniform, who, under instructions from the concierge, approached him as
he slowly paced the little court. It was the evening hour, but
daylight was long now and Paris more than ever penetrating. The scent
of flowers was in the streets, he had the whiff of violets perpetually
in his nose; and he had attached himself to sounds and suggestions,
vibrations of the air, human and dramatic, he imagined, as they were
not in other places, that came out for him more and more as the mild
afternoons deepened--a far-off hum, a sharp near click on the asphalt,
a voice calling, replying, somewhere and as full of tone as an actor's
in a play. He was to dine at hom