‘We are not very well off,’ she continued; ‘perhaps you know that.’

‘Yes,’ he interrupted.

‘But the position’s more complicated than you can know’; she was speaking carefully, weighing her words.  ’Of course you know that I have a sister younger than myself.  She’s at school in Brussels.  Well, by the Sark laws, the Seigneurie can’t be split up between the members of a family.  I think it’s the same with all land there.  It must go—­what’s the word?—­unencumbered to the eldest child.  So it must come to me—­all of it.  That leaves my sister still to be provided for.  Father explained the whole thing to me.  As it is, he has as much as he can do to keep the Seigneurie up.  This house we can’t really afford, but father thought he ought to take it,—­well, for my sake, I suppose.  So, you see, whatever money he has he must leave to my sister, and there’s still the Seigneurie for me to keep up.’

’Yes, I understand.  You are bound by duty, if you marry, to marry some one with means.  But, Clarice, it won’t be long to wait,’ and he turned back from the window into the room.

‘But till then—­don’t you see?  Of course I know you will be successful,’ and she laid considerable emphasis on the I.

Drake reflected for a moment.  ’You mean there would be trouble between your father and you.  The weight of it would fall on you.  He might distrust me.  Yes; after all, why should he not?  But still the thing’s done, isn’t it?’

Clarice rose from her chair and walked to the grate.  A fire was burning, and she still held Drake’s letter in her hand.  ’We might keep it to ourselves,’ she said diffidently.  She saw Drake’s forehead contract.  ‘For my sake,’ she said softly, laying a hand upon his sleeve.  She lifted a tear-stained face up to his with the prettiest appeal.  ’I know you hate it, but it will spare me so much.’

He said nothing, and she dropped the letter into the fire.

As Drake was leaving the house she heard, through the closed door, the sound of her father’s voice in the hall speaking to him, and felt a momentary pang of alarm.  The next instant, however, she laughed.  He might have broken his word to himself; he would not break it to her.

Drake went home, reckoning up the harm he had done with a feeling of degradation quite new to him.  Not the least part of that harm was the compromise finally agreed upon.  But for the traces of tears upon the girl’s cheeks, he would hardly have agreed to it even in the face of her appeal.  Once alone, however, he saw clearly all—­the deception that it implied—­deception which involved the girl, too, as well as himself.  He rose the next day in no more equable frame of mind, and leaving his office at three o’clock in the afternoon, walked along Cheapside, Holborn, and Oxford Street, and turned down Bond Street, meaning to pass an hour in the fencing-rooms half-way down St. James Street.  At the corner of Bruton Street he came face to face with Miss Le Mesurier.  She coloured for an instant, and then came frankly forward and held out her hand.