He repudiated an expression so charged with moral and emotional significance.  He desired to lead her gently away from a line of thought that if pursued would give her intelligence the clue.  “You can’t call it redeemed.  Nobody redeemed it.  The debt, of course, had to be paid out of my father’s estate.”

“In which case the library became yours?”

He smiled involuntarily, for she had him there, and she knew it.

“It became nothing of the sort, and if it had I could hardly go against my father’s wishes by holding on to it.”

“Can’t you see that it’s equally impossible for me to take it?”

“Why?  Try and think of it as a simple matter of business.”

He spoke like a tired man, straining after a polite endurance of her feminine persistence and refining fantasy.  “It hasn’t anything to do with you or me.”

Thus did he turn against her the argument with which she had crushed him in another such dispute nine years ago.

“I am more business-like than you are.  I remember perfectly well that your father paid more than a thousand pounds for those books in the beginning.”

“That needn’t trouble you.  It has been virtually deducted.  I’m sorry to say a few very valuable books were sold before the mortgage and could not be recovered.”

He had given himself away by that word “recovered.”  Her eyes searched him through and through to find his falsehood, as they had searched him once before to find his truth.  “It is very, very good of you,” she said.

“Of me?  Am I bothering you?  Don’t think of me except as my father’s executor.”

“Did you know that he wanted you to do this, or did you only think it?  Was it really his express wish?”

He looked her in the face and lied boldly and freely.  “It was.  Absolutely.”

And as she met that look, so luminously, so superlatively sincere, she knew that he had lied.  “All the same,” said she, “I can’t take it.  Don’t think it unfriendly of me.  It isn’t.  In fact, don’t you see it’s just because we have been—­we are—­friends that I must refuse it?  I can’t take advantage of that”—­she was going to say “feeling,” but thought better of it.

“And don’t you see by refusing you are compelling me to be dishonourable?  If you were really my friend you would think more of my honour than of your own scruples.  Or is that asking too much?” He felt that he had scored in this game of keen intelligences.

“No.  But it would be wrong of me to let your honour be influenced by our friendship.”

“Don’t think of our friendship, then.  It’s all pure business, as brutally impersonal as you like.”

“If I could only see it that way.”

“I should have thought it was quite transparently and innocently clear.”  He had scored again.  For now he had taxed her with stupidity.  “If I could persuade you that it came from my father, you wouldn’t mind.  You mind because you think it comes from me.  Isn’t that so?”