“You’re extraordinary, by Jove!” he muttered.  “You’re not a bit like what you look.  You look so fragile and tender; and yet you could have let that old man—­”

“I could only have done it if it was right.  Nothing that’s right is very hard, you know.”

“And what about the suffering?”

She half smiled, faintly shrugging her shoulders.  “Don’t you think we make more of suffering than there’s any need for?  Suffering is nothing much—­except, I suppose, the suffering that comes from want.  That’s tragic.  But physical pain—­and the things we call trials—­are nothing so terrible if you know the right way to bear them.”

The abstract question didn’t interest him.  He resumed his restless pacing.

“So,” he began again, in his tone of conducting a court-martial—­“so you refused the money in the first place, because you thought the fellow was trying to get you into his power.  Have you had any reason to change your opinion since?”

“None, except that he makes no effort to do it.”

He stopped again beside the table.  “And do you suppose he would?  When you’ve prepared your ambush cleverly enough you don’t have to go out and drag your victim into it.  You’ve only to lie still and he’ll walk in of his own accord.”

“Of course I see that.”

“Well, what then?”

She threw him a glance over her shoulder.  To do so it was necessary for her to turn her head both sidewise and upward, so that he got the exquisite lines of the neck and profile, the mysterious gray-green tint of the eyes, and the coppery gleam of her hair.  The appeal to his senses and to something beyond his senses made him gasp.  It made him tremble.  “My God, what a wife for me!” he was saying to himself.  “She’s got the pluck of a Jeanne d’Arc and the nerve of a Christian martyr.”

“Well, then,” she said, in answer to his words—­“then I don’t have to walk into the ambush—­unless I want to.”

“Does that mean that there are conceivable conditions in which you might want to?”

She turned completely round in her chair.  Both hands, with fingers interlaced, rested on the table as she looked up at him.

“I shall have to let you find your own reply to that.”

“But you know he’s in love with you.”

“I know he was in love with me once.  I’ve no absolute reason to think that he is so still.”

“But supposing he was?  Would it make any difference to you?”

“Would it make any difference to you?”

“It would make the difference—­”

He stopped in confusion.  While he was not clear as to what he was going to say, he was startled by the possibilities before him.  The one thing plain was that her question, simple as it seemed, gave an entirely new turn to the conversation.  It called on him to take the lead, and put him, neatly and skilfully, in the one place of all others which—­had he descried it in advance—­he would have been eager to avoid.  Would it make any difference to him?  What difference could it make?  What difference must it make?