would be all he should have.  As for her proposals of friendship made to him that day—­her suggestions of visits to be paid to Ashley and herself, with introductions to a greater world—­he swept them aside.  He quite understood that she was offering him the two mites that make a farthing out of the penury of her resources, and, while he was touched by the attempt to pay him, he didn’t want them.

He had said, and said again, that he didn’t want anything at all.  Neither did he.  It would have been enough for him to go on as he was going now—­to fetch and carry, to meet lawyers and pacify creditors, to protect her father because he was her father, and get a glimpse of her or a word from her when he came on his errands to Tory Hill.  There were analogies between his devotion and the adoration of a mortal for a goddess beyond the stars.  Like Hippolytus, he would have been content that his Artemis should never step down from her shrine so long as he was permitted to lay his gifts on her altar.

At least, he had felt so till to-day.  He had begun the adventure in the strength of the desire born of his visit to the scene of his father’s work at Hankow to do a little good.  True, it was an impulse of which he was more than half ashamed.  Its mere formulation in words rendered it bumptious and presumptuous.  Beyond the confession made to Rodney Temple on the night of his arrival no force could have induced him to avow it.  Better any imputation of craft than the suspicion of wanting to confer benefits on his fellow-men.  It was a satisfaction to him to be able to say, even in his own inner consciousness, that the desperate state of Guion’s affairs forced his hand and compelled him to a quixotic course which he would not otherwise have taken.

The first glimpse of Ashley brought this verbal shelter to the dust.  So long as the accepted lover had been but an abstract conception Davenant had been able to think of him with toleration.  But in presence of the actual man the feeling of antagonism was instinctive, animal, instantaneous.  Though he pumped up his phrases of welcome to a heartiness he did not feel, he was already saying to himself that his brief day of romance was done.  “He’s going to squeeze me out.”  With this alert and capable soldier on the spot, there would be no need for a clumsy interloper any longer.  They could do without him, and would be glad to see him go.

The upshot of it all was that he must retire.  It was not only the part of tact, but a gentleman could do no less.  Ashley had all the rights and powers.  The effort to withstand him would be worse than ineffectual, it would be graceless.  In Miss Guion’s eyes it would be a blunder even more unpardonable than that for which her punishment had been in some ways the ruling factor in his life.  He was sure she would not so punish him again, but her disdain would not be needed.  Merely to be de trop in her sight, merely to be troublesome, would be a chastisement from which he should suffer all the stings of shame.  If he was to go on serving her with the disinterestedness of which, to himself at any rate, he had made a boast, if he was to keep the kindly feeling she had perhaps begun to entertain for him, he must resign his provisional authority into Ashley’s hands and efface himself.