She laughed bitterly.

“Yes, I was in a prison house,” she answered, “and I should have welcomed any jailer who had come to set me free.  I married him, and sometimes I try to do my duty.  Then the other longings come, and Hampstead and my house, and my husband and my parties and my silly friends, seem like part of a dream.  Mr. Chetwode—­Arnold!”

“Fenella!”

“We were to be friends, we were to help one another.  To-night I am afraid and I think that I am a little remorseful.  It was my doing that you dined to-night with Andrea.  I have wanted to bring you, too, into the life that my brother lives, into the life where I also make sometimes excursions.  It is not a wicked life, but I do not know that it is a wise one.  I was foolish.  It was wrong of me to disturb you.  After all, you are good and solid and British, you were meant for the other ways.  Forget everything.  It is less than a week since you came first to dine with us.  Blot out those few days.  Can you?”

“Not while I live,” Arnold replied.  “You forget that it was during those few days that I met you.”

“But you are foolish,” she declared, laying her hand upon his and smiling into his face, so that the madness came back and burned in his blood.  “There is no need for you to be a gambler, there is no need for you to stake everything upon these single coups.  You haven’t felt the call.  Don’t listen for it.”

“Fenella,” he whispered hoarsely, “what was I doing when Samuel Weatherley was shipwrecked on your island!”

She laughed.

“Oh, you foolish boy!” she cried.  “What difference would it have made?”

“You can’t tell,” he answered.  “Has no one ever moved you, Fenella?  Have you never known what it is to care for any one?”

“Never,” she replied.  “I only hope that I never shall.”

“Why not?”

“Because I am a gambler,” she declared; “because to me it would mean risking everything.  And I have seen no man in the whole world strong enough and big enough for that.  You are my very dear friend, Arnold, and you are feeling very sentimental, and your head is turned just a little, but after all you are only a boy.  The taste of life is not yet between your teeth.”

He leaned closer towards her.  She put his arm gently away, shaking her head all the time.

“Do not think that I am a prude,” she said.  “You can kiss me if you like, and yet I would very much rather that you did not.  I do not know why.  I like you well enough, and certainly it is not from any sense of right or wrong.  I am like Andrea in that way.  I make my own laws.  To-night I do not wish you to kiss me.”

She was looking up at him, her eyes filled with a curious light, her lips slightly parted.  She was so close that the perfume in which her clothes had lain, faint though it was, almost maddened him.

“I don’t think that you have a heart at all!” he exclaimed, hoarsely.