‘It’s funny meeting you here,’ she said, and laughed without the least embarrassment.

Drake turned and walked by her side with a puzzled conjecture at the reason of woman’s recuperative powers.  Clarice’s eyes were as clear, her forehead as sunny, as though she had clean wiped yesterday from her consciousness.  The conjecture, however, brought the reality of yesterday only yet more home to him.  He stopped in the street and said abruptly, ‘Clarice, I can’t.’

She stopped in her turn and drew a little pattern on the pavement with the point of her umbrella.  ‘Why?’

A passer-by jostled Drake in the back.  Standing there they were blocking the way.  ’Isn’t there anywhere we could go?  Tea?  One drinks tea at this hour, eh?’

‘No.’

Clarice felt more mistress of herself in the open street, more able to cope with Drake while they walked in a throng.  She remembered enough of yesterday to avoid even the makeshift solitude of a tea-table in a public room.  ‘Let us walk on,’ she said.  ’Can’t you explain as we go?  I am late.’

She moved forward as she spoke, and Drake kept pace with her, shortening his strides.  The need of doing that, trifle though it was, increased his sense of responsibility towards her.  ’It’s so abominably deceitful, and it’s my doing.  I should involve you in the deceit.’

Clarice glanced at him sharply.  The distress of his voice was repeated in the expression of her face.  There was no doubting that he spoke sincerely.

‘I had better see your father to—­day,’ he added.

‘No,’ she replied energetically; and, after a moment’s pause, ’There’s another way.’

‘Well?’

’Let everything be as it was before yesterday.  I shall not change.  It will be better for you to be free.  Come to me when you are ready.’

She signed to a passing hansom, and it drew up by the curb.  She got into it while Drake stood with brows knitted, revolving the proposal in his mind.  ‘But you see it can’t be the same,’ he said; ’because I kissed you, didn’t I?’

‘Yes, you did,’ she replied.

The tremble of laughter in her voice made him look up to her face.  The rose deepened in her cheeks, and the laughter rippled out.  ’You are quaint,’ she said.  ’I will forget—­well—­what you said, until you are ready.  Till then it’s to be just as it was before—­only not less.  You are not to stay away’; and without waiting for an answer she lifted the trap, gave the cabman his order, and drove off.  Drake watched the hansom disappear, and absently retraced his steps down the street.  He stopped once or twice and stared vaguely into the shop-windows.  One of these was a jeweller’s, and he turned sharply away from it and quickened his pace towards the fencing-rooms.  How could it be the same, he asked himself, when the mere sparkle of an emerald ring in a jeweller’s shop-window aroused in him a feeling of distaste?