“I mean it.”

“Yet you see the danger?”

“I see the danger.”

The fact that he would not condescend to lie to her eased a little her bitter sense of defeat.

She rose awkwardly—­all of a piece.

“Then I have no more to say.  I wash my hands of you all.  Until you come to your senses, I don’t cross this threshold again.”

In spite of the threadbare phrases, genuine pain vibrated in her tone.

“Don’t rant, old thing.  You know you’ll never keep it up,” Nevil urged more gently than he had spoken yet.

But anger still dominated pain.

“When I say a thing, I mean it,” she retorted stiffly, “as you will find to your cost.”  Without troubling to answer, he lunged for the door handle; but she waved him aside.  “All humbug—­playing at politeness—­when you’ve spurned my advice.”

“As you please.”  He stood back for her to pass.  “Sorry it’s upset you so.  But we’ll see you here again—­when you’ve got over it.”

“The boy would have got over it in no time,” she flung back at him from the threshold.  “Mark my words, disaster will come of it.  Then perhaps you’ll admit I was right.”

He felt no call to argue that point.  She was gone....  And she had carefully refrained from slamming the door.  Somehow that trifling act of restraint impressed him with a sense of finality oddly lacking in her dramatic asseveration.

He stood a few moments staring at the polished oak panels.  Then he turned back and sat down in the chair she had occupied; and all the inner tension of the last hour went suddenly, completely to pieces....

It was the penalty of his artist nature, this sharp nervous reaction from strain; and with it came crowding back all the insidious doubts and anxieties that even Lilamani’s wisdom had not entirely charmed away.  He felt torn at the moment between anger with Roy for causing all this pother; and anger with Jane, who, for all her lack of tenderness and tact, was right—­up to a point.  It was just Family Herald heroics about “not crossing the threshold.”  At least—­rather to his surprise—­he found himself half hoping it was.  Roy and Lilamani could frankly detest her—­and there an end.  Nevil—­in spite of unforgiveable interludes—­was liable to be tripped up by the fact that, after all, she was his sister; and her aggression was proof that, in her own queer fashion, she loved him.  Half the trouble was that the love of each for the other took precisely the form that other could least appreciate or understand:  no uncommon dilemma in family life.  At all events, he had achieved his declaration of independence.  And he had not failed to evoke the “deuce of a row.”

With a sigh of smothered exasperation, he leaned forward and hid his face in his hands....

The door opened softly.  He started and looked up.  It was Roy—­in flannels and blazer, his dark hair slightly ruffled:  considered dispassionately (and Nevil believed he so considered him) a singularly individual and attractive figure of youth.