“This can’t go on, Elfrida!”

Cardiff had somehow possessed himself of her hand as it lay along the polished edge of the wooden seat.  It was a privilege, she permitted him sometimes, with the tacit understanding that he was not to abuse it.

“And why not—­for a little while?  It is pleasant, I think.”

“If you were in love you would know why.  You are not, I know—­you needn’t say so.  But it will come, Elfrida—­only give it the chance.  I would stake my soul on the certainty of being able to make you love me.”  His confidence in the power of his own passion was as strong as a boy’s of twenty.

“If I were in love!” Elfrida repeated slowly, with an absent smile.  “And you think it would come afterward.  That is an exploded idea, my friend.  I should feel as if I were acting out an old-fashioned novel—­an old-fashioned second-rate novel.”

She looked at him with eyes that invited him to share their laughter, but the smile he gave her was pitiful, if she could have known it.  The strain she had bee putting upon him, and promised indefinitely to put upon him, was growing greater than he could bear.

“I am afraid I most ask you to decide,” he said.  “You have been telling me two things, dear.  One thing with your lips and another thing with your eyes—­and ways of doing.  You tell me that I, must go, but you make it possible for me to stay.  For God’s sake let it be one or the other.”

“I am so sorry.  We could be friends of a sort, I think, but I can’t marry you.”

“You have never told me why.”

“Shall I tell you truly, literally—­brutally?”

“Of course!”

“Then it is not only because I don’t love you—­that there is not for me the common temptation to enter a form of bondage which, as I see it, is hateful.  That is enough, but it is not all; it is not even the principal thing.  It is”—­she hesitated—­“it is that—­that we are different, you and I. It would-be preposterous,” she went on hastily, “not to admit that you are infinitely superior—­of course—­and cleverer and wiser and more important in the world.  And that will make me absurd in your eyes when I tell you that my whole life is wrapped up in a sense which I cannot see or feel that you have at all.  You have much—­oh, a great deal—­outside of it, and I have nothing.  My life is swayed in obedience to laws that you do not even know of.  You can hardly be my friend, completely.  As your wife I should suffer and you would suffer, in a false position which could never be altered.”

She paused and looked at him seriously, and he felt that she believed what she had said.  She had, at all events, given him full permission to go.  And he was as far from being able to avail of himself of it as he had been before—­further, for every moment those slender fingers rested in his made it more impossible to relinquish them, for always.  So, he persisted, with a bitter sense of failure that would not wholly, honestly recognize itself.