‘It may interest you to know that I’m leaving Paris on Thursday,’ he said casually, one afternoon.

She started to her feet and stared at him with bewildered eyes.

‘But what is to become of me?’

‘You will marry the excellent Mr Burdon.’

‘You know I cannot live without you.  How can you be so cruel?’

‘Then the only alternative is that you should accompany me.’

Her blood ran cold, and her heart seemed pressed in an iron vice.

‘What do you mean?’

’There is no need to be agitated.  I am making you an eminently desirable offer of marriage.’

She sank helplessly into her chair.  Because she had refused to think of the future, it had never struck her that the time must come when it would be necessary to leave Haddo or to throw in her lot with his definitely.  She was seized with revulsion.  Margaret realized that, though an odious attraction bound her to the man, she loathed and feared him.  The scales fell from her eyes.  She remembered on a sudden Arthur’s great love and all that he had done for her sake.  She hated herself.  Like a bird at its last gasp beating frantically against the bars of a cage, Margaret made a desperate effort to regain her freedom.  She sprang up.

’Let me go from here.  I wish I’d never seen you.  I don’t know what you’ve done with me.’

‘Go by all means if you choose,’ he answered.

He opened the door, so that she might see he used no compulsion, and stood lazily at the threshold, with a hateful smile on his face.  There was something terrible in his excessive bulk.  Rolls of fat descended from his chin and concealed his neck.  His cheeks were huge, and the lack of beard added to the hideous nakedness of his face.  Margaret stopped as she passed him, horribly repelled yet horribly fascinated.  She had an immense desire that he should take her again in his arms and press her lips with that red voluptuous mouth.  It was as though fiends of hell were taking revenge upon her loveliness by inspiring in her a passion for this monstrous creature.  She trembled with the intensity of her desire.  His eyes were hard and cruel.

‘Go,’ he said.

She bent her head and fled from before him.  To get home she passed through the gardens of the Luxembourg, but her legs failed her, and in exhaustion she sank upon a bench.  The day was sultry.  She tried to collect herself.  Margaret knew well the part in which she sat, for in the enthusiastic days that seemed so long gone by she was accustomed to come there for the sake of a certain tree upon which her eyes now rested.  It had all the slim delicacy of a Japanese print.  The leaves were slender and fragile, half gold with autumn, half green, but so tenuous that the dark branches made a pattern of subtle beauty against the sky.  The hand of a draughtsman could not have fashioned it with a more excellent skill.  But now Margaret could take