“Oh, Dick,” she said, “are you sure—­are you quite sure—­that—­that—­I am worth keeping?”

“I am quite sure I am going to keep you,” he answered very steadily.

Her two hands closed fast upon his.  “Not—­not as a prisoner?” she whispered, wanly smiling.

“Yes, a prisoner,” he said, not without a certain grimness, “that is, until you have learnt your lesson.”

“What lesson?” she asked him wonderingly.

“That you can’t do without me,” he said, a note of challenge in his voice.

Something in his look hurt her.  She freed one hand and laid it pleadingly, caressingly, against his neck.  “Oh, Dicky,” she said, “try to understand!”

His face changed a little, and she thought his mouth quivered ever so slightly as he said.  “It’s now or never, Juliet.  If I don’t come to a perfect understanding with you to-night, we shall be strangers for the rest of our lives.”

She shivered at the finality of his words, but they gave her light.  “I have hurt you—­horribly!” she said.

He was silent.

She pressed herself to him with a sudden passionate gesture.  “Dick—­my husband—­will you forgive me—­can you forgive me—­before you understand?”

Her eyes implored him, yet just for a second he hesitated.  Then very swiftly he gathered her closely, closely against his heart, and kissed her pleading, upturned face over and over.  “Yes!” he said.  “Yes!”

She clung to him with all her quivering strength.  “I love you, darling!  I love you,—­only—­only—­you!” she whispered brokenly.  “You believe that?”

“Yes,” he said again between his kisses.

“And if I tried to do without you it was only because—­only because—­I loved you so,” she faltered on.  “Your anger is just—­the end of the world for me, Dick.  I can’t face it.  It tears my very self.”

“My darling!  My own love!” he said.

“And then—­and then—­I had such an awful doubt of you, Dicky.  I thought your love was dead, and I thought—­and I thought I couldn’t hope to hold you—­after that.  I’d got to free you somehow.  Oh, Dicky, what agony love can be!”

“Hush, darling, hush!” he said.

She lay in his arms, her eyes looking straight up to his.  “I never meant to do it, dear,—­never meant to win your love in the first place.  I always knew I wasn’t worthy of it.  I think I told you so.  Dicky, listen!  I’ve had a horrid life.  My mother was divorced when Muff and I were youngsters at school.  My father died only a year after, and no one ever cared what happened to us after that.  We had an aunt—­Lady Beatrice Farringmore—­and she launched me in society when I left school.  But she never cared—­she never cared.  She was far too busy with her own concerns.  I just went with the crowd and pleased myself.  No one ever took anything seriously in our set.  It was just a mad rush of gaiety from morning till night.  We were like a lot of empty-headed, mischievous children, horribly selfish of course, but not meaning any harm—­at least not most of us.  Everyone had a nickname.  It was the fashion.  It was Saltash who first called me Juliet.  He said I was so tragically in earnest—­which was really not true in those days.  And I called him Charles Rex.”