“I shall love you always,” he said.  “Right or wrong, always.  Remember that, too, when you think of these things.”

She turned as though slowly aroused from abstraction, then shook her head.

“It’s very brave and boyish of you to be loyal—­”

“You speak to me as though I were not years older than you!”

“I can’t help it; I am old, old, sometimes, and tired of an isolation no one can break for me.”

“If you loved me—­”

“How can I?  You know I cannot!”

“Are you afraid to love me?”

She blushed crimson, saying:  “If I—­if such a misfortune—­”

“Such a misfortune as your loving me?”

“Yes; if it came, I would never, never admit it!  Why do you say these things to me?  Won’t you understand?  I’ve tried so hard—­so hard to warn you!” The colour flamed in her cheeks; a sort of sweet anger possessed her.

“Must I tell you more than I have told before you can comprehend the utter impossibility of any—­love—­between us?”

His hand fell over hers and held it crushed.

“Tell me no more,” he said, “until you can tell me that you dare to love!”

“What do you mean?  Do you mean that a girl does not do a dishonourable thing because she dares not?—­a sinful thing because she’s afraid?  If it were only that—­” She smiled, breathless.  “It is not fear.  It is that a girl can not love where love is forbidden.”

“And you believe that?”

“Believe it!”—­in astonishment.

“Yes; do you believe it?”

She had never before questioned it.  Dazed by his impatience, dismayed, she affirmed it again, mechanically.  And the first doubt entered as she spoke, confusing her, awakening a swarm of little latent ideas and misgivings, stirring memories of half-uttered sentences checked at her entrance into a room, veiled allusions, words, nods, that she remembered but had never understood.  And, somehow, his question seemed a key to this cipher, innocently retained in the unseen brain-cells, stored up without suspicion—­almost without curiosity.

For all her recent eloquence upon unhappiness and divorce, it came to her now in some still subtle manner, that she had been speaking concerning things in the world of which she knew nothing.  And one of them, perhaps, was love.

Then every instinct within her revolted, all her innate delicacy, all the fastidious purity recoiled before the menace of his question.  Love!  Was it possible?  Was this that she already felt, love?  Could such treachery to herself, such treason to training and instinct arise within her and she not know it?

Panic-stricken she raised her head; and at sight of him a blind impulse to finish with him possessed her—­to crush out that menace—­end it for ever—­open his eyes to the inexorable truth.

“Lean nearer,” she said quietly.  Every vestige of blood had left her face.