“No, I don’t think I ever have.  I went away from home when I was eighteen—­I wasn’t happy there.  Then I had to work too hard.”

“Then you are a little starved gutter-arab.”  He took her gently in his arms.  “And what do I seem to you—­eh?  Sort of fairy prince, I suppose, in gold armour.”

“You seem like God, sometimes,” she whispered.

He put her away with a stab of conscience—­seated her on a chair and looked down at her.

“It’s silly to talk like that,” he said evenly.  “If there is a God—­and I suppose there is—­the world spends a heap of money in fostering the idea—­then He’s certainly more consistent in His being than I am—­though consistency always seems to me His weak point.  But you’ve not got to idealize me, you know.  You remember what I once said to you—­don’t you?”

“What was that?”

“There’s a beast in every man, thank God!”

“Yes—­I don’t think I shall ever forget that.”

“Well—­don’t,” he added.

But even this did not harbour in her mind.  She wrote long, impulsive letters to Janet, pouring out a flood of description of all the places which they visited, opening her heart of its perfect happiness.

“You said he was hard once,” she wrote from Florence.  “You said you knew he was hard.  He’s never said a hard thing to me the whole time we’ve been away.  He may be hard to other people.  I’ve seen him awfully bitter sometimes, but never to me.  We are in love, you see.  We shall always be in love.  Dear, dear old Janet, I wish you could be with us.”

Janet took a deep breath when she had finished the reading of that letter, and when Mrs. Hewson pushed some shrimps on to her plate, she pulled the shells from them with impatient energy.

And so—­slowly, even in that month—­some little of the change in her character was wrought.  Her nature began to set in the mould of luxury in which he placed her.  Not for one moment was she spoilt by it; not for one moment made selfish.  Whenever he gave her money for a definite object, she still made her purchases as cheaply as possible, still brought what was left over in the flat of an empty palm to him.  But the enfranchising influence of those two years of hard work began to lose its effect.  She lost independence at every turn and, by the time they returned to London, was beginning to lean on Traill, rely on him, submit subserviently to every wish he uttered.

Such had been her desertion from the cause, a conscript in which, she had so ill-understood.  The falling back into luxury, the acceptance of those things which in her tentative, unrevolutionary way she had always imagined to come into her right of possession, had been very easy—­very gentle—­the drifting of a feather on an idle summer wind.  She had let herself be borne on it, using it, not as an advantage, not as a step to lift her to a greater freedom and a wider independence, but as a fit setting, a worthy environment to this love which consumed the whole of her being and rode, the master, with an unslacking rein, over all her actions.