“Him ...!” cried Phoebe; “never, never!  You’re being cruel to me, Ishmael, so you are!  If you’ve only come to tease me you can go home to your old manor-house again!”

“Why—­Phoebe!  What’s the matter; what have I said to hurt you?” asked Ishmael.  “Why, I wouldn’t do that for the world!  Phoebe, dear, tell me what it is that’s the matter.  Surely you can trust me!  Is it because Archelaus has gone?”

Phoebe burst into tears.  Ishmael was alarmed, embarrassed, even irritated, yet somehow she was nestling against him and his arms were holding her while he consoled her.  She sobbed on, her warm little body pressed convulsively against him; his words “surely you can trust me ...” had caught at her heart.  After months of furtive meetings with Archelaus, after being drawn into a whirlpool of passion which she could not resist and yet always resented, hating something in Archelaus even when his ardour pursued her most, hating the thought of him at every moment before and after, when his lips were not actually upon hers—­after all this she felt she wanted nothing but to fling herself on this quieter, kinder, younger man, on whom she still felt the freshness she had lost.  It was only fair, she told herself; if Ishmael had cared for her a year ago she would have been armed against Archelaus and her own nature.  Slowly her sobs grew less frequent—­they became the faint sniffs of a tired child; but she still lay in his arms, snuggling closer, one hand, very small and smooth, creeping up to lie against his neck.  Ishmael looked down, and through the dusk he could see how wet were the lashes on her pale cheek; the curve of her throat and bosom was still troubled by sobbing breaths.  He drew her closer; then his clasp of her began to change, grow fiercer; she felt it and thrilled to it, lifted her mouth that looked so childish, and which he told himself through the clamour of his pulses there would be no harm in kissing, as though she were the child she looked.  But it was not a child’s kiss he gave her; nor, as he could but feel, was it a child’s return she tendered.

“Phoebe ...!” he began; “Phoebe ...!” He never knew himself what he was trying to say, whether it were protest or excuse or a mere stammer of passion.  She interrupted him with a low cry.

“Oh, Ishmael! it was always you—­really, always you ...  I didn’t know.  It’ll be always you...!”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE IMMORTAL MOMENT

That which Lenine had hoped for some twelve years, which the Parson and Vassie had first feared and then laughed at, which Ishmael himself had hardly thought of, and then merely to dismiss with a smile, had come to pass—­so simply, with such a logical though quiet following of effect on various causes, that it was no wonder Ishmael felt enmeshed in the web of something it was not worth fighting to cut away.  At first, on the heels of the miller’s