“I will not have it so!” she said excitedly, “I will not have it so!  If he is a man—­a real man—­he will not have it so, either.  If he will, he does not love you; mark what I say, Valerie—­he does not love you enough.  No man can love a woman enough to accept that from her; it would be a paradox, I tell you!”

“He loves me enough,” said Valerie, very pale.  “He could not love me as I care for him; it is not in a man to do it, nor in any human being to love as I love him.  You don’t understand, Rita.  I must be a part of him—­not very much, because already there is so much to him—­and I am so—­so unimportant.”

“You are more important than he is,” said Rita fiercely—­“with all your fineness and loyalty and divine sympathy and splendid humility—­with your purity and your loveliness; and in spite of his very lofty intellect and his rather amazing genius, and his inherited social respectability—­you are the more important to the happiness and welfare of this world—­even to the humblest corner in it!”

“Rita!  Rita!  What wild, partisan nonsense you are talking!”

[Illustration:  “His thoughts were mostly centred on Valerie.”]

“Oh, Valerie, Valerie, if you only knew!  If you only knew!”

* * * * *

Querida called next day.  Rita was at home but flatly refused to see him.

“Tell Mr. Querida,” she said to the janitor, “that neither I nor Miss West are at home to him, and that if he is as nimble at riddles as he is at mischief he can guess this one before his friend Mr. Cardemon returns from a voyage around the world.”

Which reply slightly disturbed Querida.

All during dinner—­and he was dining alone—­he considered it; and his thoughts were mostly centred on Valerie.

Somehow, some way or other he must come to an understanding with Valerie West.  Somehow, some way, she must be brought to listen to him.  Because, while he lived, married or single, poor or wealthy, he would never rest, never be satisfied, never wring from life the last drop that life must pay him, until this woman’s love was his.

He loved her as such a man loves; he had no idea of letting that love for her interfere with other ambitions.

Long ago, when very poor and very talented and very confident that the world, which pretended to ignore him, really knew in its furtive heart that it owed him fame and fortune and social position, he had determined to begin the final campaign with a perfectly suitable marriage.

That was all years ago; and he had never swerved in his determination—­not even when Valerie West surprised his life in all the freshness of her young beauty.

And, as he sat there leisurely over his claret, he reflected, easily, that the time had come for the marriage, and that the woman he had picked out was perfectly suitable, and that the suitable evening to inform her was the present evening.