“You’ll keep your promise to me?” she persisted, softly, with a kind of pitiful relentlessness.

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

He jerked out the words in the brusque way in which a man says all that, for the moment, he is physically able to utter.  She allowed more time to elapse.  The roar of traffic and the clanging of electric trams came up from the street below, but no sound seemed able to penetrate the stillness in which they sat.  As far as Miriam was conscious of herself at all, it was simply to note the curious deadness of her emotions, as though she had become a mere machine for doing right, like a clock that strikes punctually.  Nevertheless, it caused her some surprise when he raised himself and said, in a voice that would have been casual on a common occasion: 

“I suppose you think me a cad?”

“No; why should I?”

“Because I am one.”

“I don’t know why you should say that, or what it has to do with—­anything.”

“It’s about that—­that—­promise.”

“Oh!”

“Do you mind if we speak quite frankly?  I should like to.  I’ve been bluffing that point ever since you and I met again.  It’s been torture to have to do it—­damned, humiliating torture; but it’s been difficult to do anything else.  You see, I couldn’t even speak of it without seeming to—­to insult you—­that is, unless you took me in just the right way.”

His look, his attitude, the tones of his voice, the something woe-begone and yet boyish in his expression, recalled irresistibly the days in the cabin, when he often wore just this air.  She had observed before that when they were alone together the years seemed to fall from his manner, while he became the immature, inexperienced young fugitive again.  She had scarcely expected, however, that this lapse into youth would occur to-night.  She herself felt ages old—­as though all the ends of the world had come upon her.

“You may say anything you like.  There’s nothing you could possibly tell me that I shouldn’t understand.”

“Well, then, when I made that promise, I meant to keep it, and to keep it in a special way.  I thought—­of course we were both very young—­but I thought that, after what had happened—­”

“Wait a minute.  I want to tell you something before you go on.”  She rallied her spirit’s forces for a desperate step, gathering all her life’s possible happiness into one extravagant handful, and flinging it away, in order to save her pride before this man, who was about to tell her that he had never been able to love her.  “What I am going to say may strike you as irrelevant; but if it is, you can ignore it.  I expect to be married—­in a little while—­it’s practically a settled thing—­to Charles Conquest, whom I think you know.  Now, will you go on, please?”

He stared at her in utter blankness.

“Good God!”

He got up and took a few restless turns up and down the room, his head bent, his hands behind his back.  He reseated himself when his confused impressions grew clearer.