He moved uneasily in his seat.  Her words sounded ominous.  He was suddenly conscious that his present state of determination was the result of a battle, and that the war was not yet ended.

“She is so beautiful, that Mrs. Weatherley,” Ruth continued, clasping her hands together and looking for a moment away from her surroundings.  “No one could be blamed for climbing a little way out of the dull world if she held out her hands.  I have seen so little of either of them, Arnold, but I do know that they both of them have that curious gift—­would you call it charm?—­the gift of creating affection.  No one has ever spoken to me more kindly and more graciously than Count Sabatini did when he sat by my side on the lawn.  What is that gift, Arnold?  Do you know that with every word he spoke I felt that he was not in the least a stranger?  There was something familiar about his voice, his manner—­everything.”

“I think that they are both quite wonderful people,” Arnold admitted.

“Mrs. Weatherley, too, was kind,” Ruth went on; “but I felt that she did not like me very much.  She has an interest in you, and like all women she was a little jealous—­not in the ordinary way, I don’t mean,” she corrected herself hastily, “but no woman likes any one in whom she takes an interest to be very kind to any one else.”

They had reached the stage of their coffee.  The band was playing the latest waltz.  It was all very commonplace, but they were both young and uncritical.  The waltz was one which Fenella had played after dinner at Bourne End, while they had sat out in the garden, lingering over their dessert.  A flood of memories stirred him.  The soft sensuousness of that warm spring night, with its perfumed silence, its subtly luxurious setting, stole through his senses like a narcotic.  Ruth was right.  It was not to be so easy!  He called for his bill and paid it.  Ruth laid her fingers upon his arm.

“Arnold,” she began timidly, “there is something more.  I scarcely know how to say it to you and yet it ought not to be difficult.  You talk all the time as though you were my brother, or as though it were your duty to help me.  It isn’t so, dear, really, is it?  If you could manage to lend me your room for one week, I think that I might be able to help myself a little.  There is a place the clergyman told us of who came to see me once—­”

Arnold interrupted her almost roughly.  A keen pang of remorse assailed him.  He knew very well that if she had not been intuitively conscious of some change in him, the thought which prompted her words would never have entered her brain.

“Don’t let me hear you mention it!” he exclaimed.  “I have made all the arrangements.  It wouldn’t do for me to live in an attic now that I am holding a responsible position in the city.  Come along.  Lean on my arm and mind the corner.”

They had purposely chosen a table close to the door, so that they had only a few steps to take.  Arnold called a taxi and handed Ruth in before he told the man the address.