She cared not who wept; as she had no faith, nor power for pity, so she had no tears.

She took Osborn Kerr into her hands.

She said idly, to pass the time, but softly, just as if there was some meaning behind the question:  “What made you think there was anyone else, dear?”

He looked at her and spoke rather hoarsely, under the influence of the matter in hand:  “Oh well; there might have been.  Roselle, do you think you can love me?”

“I could,” she answered.  She assimilated the details of a near-by toilette.  “But—­”

“Don’t let’s have any ‘buts.’”

She had no subtlety, only the power of making what she said subtle; and she said: 

“I don’t know that loving is wise.”

Osborn was in her hands; thrown upon her mercy; a beggar for just so much as she cared to give.  He answered: 

“Who cares about wisdom?  It’s the only thing worth doing, anyway.”

Roselle began pulling her fur coat up over her arms; it was past ten o’clock; and on Sundays she went to bed early, to counteract as far as might be the results of all the late nights during the week.

“Take me home,” she demanded.

In the taxicab Osborn took her into his arms and began whispering to her things to which she did not listen; had he only known it, she was extremely sleepy from the effects of all the fresh air during the day, but triumphantly he took her inertia for the surrender for which he had, so suddenly, craved.

He was begging for that promise about Paris, but she would not give it.  A month?  What an age it was—­any good thing might happen.

She would not let him come into the flat.  “I’m too sleepy,” she declared.  She stood before him on the inner side of her threshold, with a faint smile on her face that was as pale as magnolia flowers, and her eyelids drooping heavily; she put out a lazy hand against his chest and warded off his entry.  When she sent him away, he felt on fire, from the last look of her, thus.

CHAPTER XXVI

COMPREHENSION

When Marie had waved to her husband a stereotyped good-bye, and had kissed schoolboy George a warm one, on Monday morning, when leisurely quiet had come again to the flat, and as she still lingered over her newspaper, the door bell rang and Mrs. Desmond Rokeby was admitted.

Julia—­fresh, heavenly, without a frown, without a care, without a regret—­blew into Number Thirty like a Christmas rose and clasped Marie in a glad embrace.

“It’s early; it’s shockingly early, but I came up with Desmond this morning and knowing your habits—­you do still wheel your own perambulator on the Heath, don’t you, at eleven-thirty?—­I rushed here first.”

“How splendid you look!”

“I feel splendid!” The two women stood at arm’s length, eyeing each other inquisitively and frankly, and Julia’s ingenuous blush was the reflection of a divine dawn.