“Oh yes; I think I’ve a genius for that.”

“Rather!  No one can touch you.”  With this he turned more to her again.  “But you can get, with a move, greater advantages?”

“I can get in the suburbs cheaper lodgings.  I live with my mother.  We need some space.  There’s a particular place that has other inducements.”

He just hesitated.  “Where is it?”

“Oh quite out of your way.  You’d never have time.”

“But I tell you I’d go anywhere.  Don’t you believe it?”

“Yes, for once or twice.  But you’d soon see it wouldn’t do for you.”

He smoked and considered; seemed to stretch himself a little and, with his legs out, surrender himself comfortably.  “Well, well, well—­I believe everything you say.  I take it from you—­anything you like—­in the most extraordinary way.”  It struck her certainly—­and almost without bitterness—­that the way in which she was already, as if she had been an old friend, arranging for him and preparing the only magnificence she could muster, was quite the most extraordinary.  “Don’t, don’t go!” he presently went on.  “I shall miss you too horribly!”

“So that you just put it to me as a definite request?”—­oh how she tried to divest this of all sound of the hardness of bargaining!  That ought to have been easy enough, for what was she arranging to get?  Before he could answer she had continued:  “To be perfectly fair I should tell you I recognise at Cocker’s certain strong attractions.  All you people come.  I like all the horrors.”

“The horrors?”

“Those you all—­you know the set I mean, your set—­show me with as good a conscience as if I had no more feeling than a letter-box.”

He looked quite excited at the way she put it.  “Oh they don’t know!”

“Don’t know I’m not stupid?  No, how should they?”

“Yes, how should they?” said the Captain sympathetically.  “But isn’t ‘horrors’ rather strong?”

“What you do is rather strong!” the girl promptly returned.

“What I do?”

“Your extravagance, your selfishness, your immorality, your crimes,” she pursued, without heeding his expression.

“I say!”—­her companion showed the queerest stare.

“I like them, as I tell you—­I revel in them.  But we needn’t go into that,” she quietly went on; “for all I get out of it is the harmless pleasure of knowing.  I know, I know, I know!”—­she breathed it ever so gently.

“Yes; that’s what has been between us,” he answered much more simply.

She could enjoy his simplicity in silence, and for a moment she did so.  “If I do stay because you want it—­and I’m rather capable of that—­there are two or three things I think you ought to remember.  One is, you know, that I’m there sometimes for days and weeks together without your ever coming.”

“Oh I’ll come every day!” he honestly cried.