“I believe that you have,” she answered, “but in the same way that I have always cared for you.  You do not care for me as you do for Emily de Reuss, nor do you want me so much as the woman whom you cannot have.  I want to be honest, dear.  Perhaps if I loved you and felt that there was no one else in this world whom I could care for, this might be enough.  I might be content with the chance that the rest would come, although no woman, Douglas, likes to think herself a makeshift—­to be offered anything less than the whole.  You see it is for life, isn’t it?  When you asked me, I never dreamed but that so long as you wanted me at all, you wanted me more than any one else in the world.  Now I know that this was not so.  I am only an insignificant little thing, Douglas, and not fit to be your companion in many ways.  But I could not marry you to think that there would be moments when you and I would stand apart, that there would be another woman living, whose coming might quicken your heart, and make the world a more beautiful place for you.  Can you understand that, I wonder?”

“No,” he answered fiercely.  “I asked you then, I beg of you now, as an honest man.  If you will have me I will pluck out from my heart every other memory by the roots—­there shall not live in this world any other woman for me.  Nay, it is done already.  She has gone for ever.”

“Douglas,” she said gently, “there are some things which a woman knows more about than a man.  Listen, and answer truthfully.  If she and I stood before you here, both free, both with our hands stretched out towards you—­ah, I need not go any further, need I?  You think that you have lost her, and you want me to help you to forget.  It is too dangerous an experiment, Douglas.  We will leave it alone.”

“I thought,” he said slowly, “that you cared for me.”

“As a very, very dear friend and comrade I do indeed,” she answered.  “As anything else I might have learnt to—­but not now.”

There was a short silence between them.  It was not until then, that he realised how dear during these last few months her companionship had been to him.  He looked into the fire with sad, listless eyes.  After all, what was success worth?  He had grasped at the shadow, and Cicely with her charming little ways, her glorious companionableness and her dainty prettiness, was lost to him for ever.  He had too much self-restraint to indulge in anything in the nature of recrimination.  In his heart he felt that Drexley had taken his place—­and whose the fault save his own?  A sense of intolerable weariness swept over him as he rose to bid her good-by.  Yet he was man enough to show a brave front.

“I believe you are right, Cicely,” he said.  “What I wished for after all was selfish.  Your friendship I know that I may keep.”

“Always,” she answered, giving him both her hands.

On the stairs he passed Drexley with a bunch of violets in his coat and a new light in his face.  A. sudden impulse of anger seized him.  The second cup on the teatray upstairs, the glowing chrysanthemums, the change in Cicely—­here was the meaning of these things.  But for him, she would have been content with what he had to give her.