“Try me,” she said demurely.

He swung round on her with a sudden fierceness.

“By God!” he exclaimed.  “If you knew the temptation . . . if you knew how I long to take what you offer!”

She smiled at him—­a slow, sweet smile that curved her mouth, and climbing to her eyes lit them with a soft radiance.

“Well?” she said quietly.  “Why not?”

He got up abruptly, and going to the window, stood with his back to her, looking out into the night.

She watched him consideringly.  Intuitively she knew that he was fighting a battle with himself.  She had always been conscious of the element of friction in their intercourse.  This evening it had suddenly crystallised into a definite realisation that although this man desired to be her friend—­Truth, at the bottom of her mental well, whispered perhaps even something more—­he was caught back, restrained by the knowledge of some obstacle, some hindrance to their friendship of which she was entirely ignorant.

She waited in silence.

Presently he turned back to her, and she gathered from his expression that he had come to a decision.  In the moment that elapsed before he spoke she had time to be aware of a sudden, almost breathless anxiety, and instinctively she let her lids fall over her eyes lest he should read and understand the apprehension in them.

“Diana.”

His voice came gently and gravely to her ears.  With an effort she looked up and found him regarding her with eyes from which all the old ironical mockery had fled.  They were very steady and kind—­kinder than she had ever believed it possible for them to be.  Her throat contracted painfully, and she stretched out her hand quickly, pleadingly, like a child.

He took it between both his, holding it with the delicate care one accords a flower, as though fearful of hurting it.

“Diana, I’m going to accept—­what you offer me.  Heaven knows I’ve little right to!  There are . . . worlds between you, and me. . . .  But if a man dying of thirst in the desert finds a pool—­a pool of crystal water—­is he to be blamed if he drinks—­if he quenches his thirst for a moment?  He knows the pool is not his—­never can he his.  And when the rightful owner comes along—­why, he’ll go away, back to the loneliness of the desert again.  But he’ll always remember that his lips have once drunk from the pool—­and been refreshed.”

Diana spoke very low and wistfully.

“He—­he must go back to the desert?”

Errington bent his head.

“He must go back,” he answered.  “The gods have decreed him outcast from life’s pleasant places; he is ordained to wander alone—­always.”

Diana drew her hand suddenly away from his, and the hasty movement knocked over the little silver salt-cellar on the table, scattering the salt on the cloth between them.

“Oh!” she cried, flushing with distress.  “I’ve spilled the salt between us—­we shall quarrel.”