Having already heard this confession in what now seemed the far-off days in Southsea, she could hear it again with no more than a sense of oppression about the heart.

“Yes,” she smiled, bravely.  “I know you are.  And between two ills you choose the one that has some compensation attached to it.”

“Between two ills,” he corrected, “I’m choosing the only course open to a man of honor.  Isn’t that it?”

There was a wistful inflection on the query.  It put forth at one and the same time a request for corroboration and a challenge to a contrary opinion.  If there could be no contrary opinion, he would have been glad of some sign of approval or applause.  He wanted to be modest; and yet it was a stimulus to doing precisely the right thing to get a little praise for it, especially from a woman like Drusilla.

In this for once she disappointed him.  “Of course you are,” she assented, even too promptly.

“And yet you’re advising me,” he said, returning to the charge, “to make a bolt for it—­and leave Olivia to shift for herself.”

“If I remember rightly, the question you raised was not about you, but about her.  It wasn’t as to whether you should marry her, but as to whether she should marry you.  I’m not disputing your point of view; I’m only defending Olivia’s.  I can see three good reasons why you should keep your word to her—­”

“Indeed?  And what are they?”

She told them off on her fingers.  “First, as you can’t do anything else.  Second—­”

“Your first reason,” he interrupted, hastily, as though he feared she suspected him of not being convinced of it, “covers the whole ground.  We don’t need the rest.”

“Still,” she insisted, “we might as well have them.  Second, it’s the more prudent of two rather disadvantageous courses.  Third—­to quote your own words—­you’re head over heels in love with her.  It’s easy to see that now, and now another of these reasons is uppermost in your mind; but it’s also easy to see that none of them makes a conclusive appeal to Olivia Guion.  That’s the point.”

“The point is that I’m in love with her, and—­if it’s not claiming too much—­she with me.  We’ve nothing else to consider.”

“You haven’t.  She has.  She has all the things I’ve just hinted at—­and ever so many more; besides which,” she added, taking a detached, casual tone, “I suppose she has to make up her mind one way or another as to what she’s going to do about Peter Davenant.”

The crow’s-foot wrinkles about his eyes deepened to a frown of inquiry.  “About Peter—­who?”

Drusilla still affected a casual tone.  “Oh?  Hasn’t she told you about him?”

“Not a word.  Who is he?”

She nodded in the direction of the house.  “He’s up-stairs with Cousin Henry.”

“The big fellow who was here just now?  That—­lumpkin?”

“Yes,” she said, dryly, “that—­lumpkin.  It was he who gave Cousin Henry the money to meet his liabilities.”