“Not at all.  What pleases you, pleases me.”

Gertrude made him a little bow, and idly knocked the balls about with her cue.  Erskine’s eyes wandered, and his lip moved irresolutely.  He had settled with himself that his declaration should be a frank one—­heart to heart.  He had pictured himself in the act of taking her hand delicately, and saying, “Gertrude, I love you.  May I tell you so again?” But this scheme did not now seem practicable.

“Miss Lindsay.”

Gertrude, bending over the table, looked up in alarm.

“The present is as good an opportunity as I will—­as I shall—­as I will.”

“Shall,” said Gertrude.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Shall,” repeated Gertrude.  “Did you ever study the doctrine of necessity?”

“The doctrine of necessity?” he said, bewildered.

Gertrude went to the other side of the table in pursuit of a ball.  She now guessed what was coming, and was willing that it should come; not because she intended to accept, but because, like other young ladies experienced in such scenes, she counted the proposals of marriage she received as a Red Indian counts the scalps he takes.

“We have had a very pleasant time of it here,” he said, giving up as inexplicable the relevance of the doctrine of necessity.  “At least, I have.”

“Well,” said Gertrude, quick to resent a fancied allusion to her private discontent, “so have I.”

“I am glad of that—­more so than I can convey by words.”

“Is it any business of yours?” she said, following the disagreeable vein he had unconsciously struck upon, and suspecting pity in his efforts to be sympathetic.

“I wish I dared hope so.  The happiness of my visit has been due to you entirely.”

“Indeed,” said Gertrude, wincing as all the hard things Trefusis had told her of herself came into her mind at the heels of Erskine’s unfortunate allusion to her power of enjoying herself.

“I hope I am not paining you,” he said earnestly.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said, standing erect with sudden impatience.  “You seem to think that it is very easy to pain me.”

“No,” he said timidly, puzzled by the effect he had produced.  “I fear you misunderstand me.  I am very awkward.  Perhaps I had better say no more.”  Gertrude, by turning away to put up her cue, signified that that was a point for him to consider; she not intending to trouble herself about it.  When she faced him again, he was motionless and dejected, with a wistful expression like that of a dog that has proffered a caress and received a kick.  Remorse, and a vague sense that there was something base in her attitude towards him, overcame her.  She looked at him for an instant and left the room.

The look excited him.  He did not understand it, nor attempt to understand it; but it was a look that he had never before seen in her face or in that of any other woman.  It struck him as a momentary revelation of what he had written of in “The Patriot Martyrs” as