She had taken the plunge now.  Her own colour had risen—­her hand shook a little on her needles.  And she had clearly roused some strong emotion in Farrell.  After a few moments’ silence, he fell upon her, speaking rather huskily.

‘You mean I have taken advantage of her?’

‘I don’t mean anything of the kind!’ Hester’s tone shewed her distress.  ’I know that all you have done has been out of pure friendship and goodness—­

He stopped her.

‘Don’t go on!’ he said roughly.  ’Whatever I am, I’m not a hypocrite.  I worship the ground she treads on!’

There was silence.  Hester bent again over her work.  The thoughts of both flew back over the preceding six months.  Nelly’s utter collapse after five or six weeks in London, when the closest enquiries, backed by Farrell’s intelligence, influence and money—­he had himself sent out a special agent to Geneva—­had failed to reveal the slightest trace of George Sarratt; her illness, pneumonia, the result of a slight chill affecting a general physical state depressed by grief and sleeplessness; her long and tedious convalescence; and that pitiful dumbness and inertia from which she had only just begun to emerge.  Hester was thinking too of the nurses, the doctors, the lodgings at Torquay, the motor, the endless flowers and books!—­all provided, practically, by Farrell, aided and abetted by Bridget’s readiness—­a discreditable readiness, in the eyes of a person of such Spartan standards as Hester Martin—­to avail herself to any extent of other people’s money.  The patient was not to blame.  Even in the worst times of her illness, Nelly had shewn signs of distress and revolt.  But Bridget, instructed by Farrell, had talked vaguely of ‘a loan from a friend’; and Nelly had been too ill, too physically weak, to urge enquiry further.

Seeing that he was to blame, Farrell broke in upon Hester’s recollections.

’You know very well’—­he said vehemently—­’that if anything less had been done for her, she would have died!’

Would she?  It was the lavishness and costliness of Farrell’s giving which had shocked Hester’s sense of delicacy, and had given rise—­she was certain—­to gossip among the Farrell friends and kindred that could easily have been avoided.  She looked at her companion steadily.

’Suppose we grant it, Willy.  But now she’s convalescent, she’s going to get strong.  Let her live her own life.  You can’t marry her—­and’—­she added it deliberately—­’she is as much in love with her poor George as she ever was!’

Farrell moved restlessly in his chair.  She saw him wince—­and she had intended the blow.

’I can’t marry her—­yet—­perhaps for years.  But why can’t I be her friend?  Why can’t I share with her the things that give me pleasure—­books—­art—­and all the rest?  Why should you condemn me to see her living on a pittance, with nobody but a sister who is as hard as nails to look after her?—­lonely, and unhappy, and dull—­when I know that I could help her, turn her mind away from her trouble—­make her take some pleasure in life again?  You talk, Hester, as though we had a dozen lives to play with, instead of this one rickety business!’