oss House he
asked me to marry him. I . . . I don't defend myself; I'd never dreamed
of marrying him. Even then it wouldn't have been so bad, if I'd told him
the truth, if I'd admitted that I'd led him on to punish him. Instead
. . . I looked for some excuse which would save _my_ face; I said 'But you
aren't a Catholic, are you?' I never saw him again till my cousin Jim
Loring's ball just before the war. . . ."

At the memory of their meeting Barbara shuddered until she could not
speak. There had been no hint of warning; she was in the drawing-room
after dinner when Lady Knightrider's car arrived from Raglan, and Jack
put his head in at the door to ask if he might have supper with her.

"I asked him what he'd been doing with himself all the summer," Barbara
went on with a spurt. "He said, 'I've just been received into your
Church.'"

She paused and stared in terror round the room as though it were
changing under her eyes into the haunted banqueting-hall of Loring
Castle.

"I couldn't _speak_. . . . The music stopped, I heard people clapping,
it went on again. Then there were voices on the stairs, and Jack asked
me again to marry him. I said I couldn't. He wanted to know why. Then
. . . then I _had_ to tell him I wasn't in love with him. Then he saw
everything."

Barbara looked up quickly, with her hand to her forehead as though to
ward off a blow. It was then that Jack stared at her, through her, into
her soul; and his eyes had followed her ever since. At first she braced
herself to meet his attack, but it was not the occasion for conventional
recriminations. If a man's soul could be imperilled, she had handed
Jack's over to damnation. God . . . Hell . . . Immortal souls. . . . She
had not believed in them till that moment, but there was always that
eerie hundredth chance that they existed.

Eerie. . . .

Her attention was captured by the word and wandered away in search of a
missing line.

"_It's like those eerie stories nurses tell,
Of how some actor on a stage played Death,
With pasteboard crown, sham orb and tinselled dart,
And called himself the monarch of the world;
Then, going in the tire-room afterward,
Because the play was done, to shift himself,
Got touched upon the sleeve familiarly,
The moment he had shut the closet door,
By Death himself._"

Jack had sat silent and motionless, too much dazed even to rise and
leave her. There was a sound of more voices in th