She shrugged her shoulders as if she had suddenly become tired of my questions, perhaps of myself, also.

“You’re so outside it all,” she said.

“I know I am,” I admitted.  “But—­I don’t want to remain outside.”

“I don’t know why I’ve been telling you as much as I have,” she returned.

“I can only plead my profound interest,” I said.

“In Arthur?  Or in us, generally?” she inquired and frowned as if she forbade me to say that my chief interest might be in herself.

“In all of you and in the situation,” I tried, hoping to please her.  “I was prepared to dislike the Jervaises and all they stood for, before this talk with you.  Now...”

“But you’re well off, aren’t you?” she said with a faint air of contempt. “You can’t be an insurge.  You’d be playing against your own side.”

“If you think that, why did you give me so much confidence to begin with?” I retaliated.

“Oh!  I’m always doing silly things,” she said.  “It was silly to play with that foolish Jervaise man this morning.  It was silly to offend him this evening.  I don’t—­think.  I ought to be whipped.”  She had apparently forgotten her recent distrust of me, for she continued in the tone of one who makes an ultimate confession.  “As a matter of fact, I suppose I’m chiefly responsible for the whole thing.  I egged them on.  Arthur would have gone on adoring Brenda as a kind of divinity for ever, if I hadn’t brought them together.  He’s afraid to touch her, even now.  I just didn’t think.  I never do till it’s too late.”

“But you’re not sorry—­about them, are you?” I put in.

“I’m sorry for my father,” she said.  “Oh!  I’m terribly sorry for him.”  Her eyes were extraordinarily tender and compassionate as she spoke.  I felt that if any lover of Anne’s could ever inspire such devotion as showed in her face at that moment, he would indeed be blest.

“He’s sixty,” she went on in a low, brooding voice, “and he’s—­he’s so—­rooted.”

“Is there no chance of their letting you stay on, if Arthur and Brenda went to Canada?” I asked.

Her face was suddenly hard again as she replied.  “I don’t think there’s one chance in a million,” she said.  “The Jervaise prestige couldn’t stand such relations as us, living at their very doors.  Besides, I know I’ve upset that horrid Jervaise man.  He’ll be revengeful.  He’s so weak, and that sort are always vindictive.  He’ll be mean and spiteful.  Oh! no, it’s one of two things, either Arthur will have to go back to Canada without Brenda, or we’ll all have to go together.”

Her tone and attitude convinced me.  If I had been able to consider the case logically and without prejudice, I should probably have scorned this presentation of rigid alternatives as the invention of a romantic mind; I might have recognised in it the familiar device of the dramatist.  But I had so far surrendered myself to the charm of Anne’s individuality that I accepted her statement without the least shadow of criticism.  It was the search to find some mechanical means of influencing the Jervaises’ decision that reminded me of Arthur Banks’s hint of an advantage that he might use in a last emergency.