“Yes,” said she, “but I feel it coming.”

“Maggie, you oughtn’t to live alone like this.  See here, you ought to marry.  You ought to marry Mr. Mumford.  Why don’t you?”

“I don’t want to marry anybody.  And I don’t love him.”

“Well, don’t think about that other thing.  Don’t think about it.  You’ll be all right.”

“I won’t think,” said Maggie, and thought profoundly.

“Mr. Majendie,” she said suddenly.

“Madam.”

“You mustn’t be afraid.  I shall never do anything I know you wouldn’t like me to.”

“All right.  Only don’t think too much about that, either.”

“I can’t help thinking.  You’ve been so good to me.”

“I should try and forget that, too, a little more, if I were you.  I’m only paying some of Mr. Gorst’s debts for him.”

The name called up no colour to her cheek.  Maggie had forgotten Gorst, and all he had done for her.

“And you’re paying me back.”

She shook her head.  “I can’t ever pay you back.”

Poor little girl!  Was that what her mind was always running on?

There was silence again between them.  And then Majendie looked at Maggie.

She was sitting very still, as if she were waiting for something, and yet content.  Her eyes were swimming, as if with tears; but there were no tears in them.  Her face was reddening, as if with shame, but there was no shame in it.  She seemed to be listening, dazed and enchanted, to her own secret, the running whisper of her blood.  Her lips were parted, and, as he looked at her, they closed and opened again in sympathy with the delicate tremors that moved her throat under her rounded chin.  In her brooding look there was neither reminiscence nor foreboding; it was the look of a creature surrendered wholly to her hour.

As he looked at her his nerves sent an arrow of warning, a hot tremor darting from heart to brain.

“I must go now, Maggie,” he said.

When he stood up, his knees shook under him.

“Not yet,” said Maggie.  “I’m all alone in the house, and I’m afraid.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said roughly.  “I’ve got to go.”

He strode towards the door while Maggie stared after him in terror.  She understood nothing but that he was going to leave her.  What had she done to drive him away?

“You’re ill,” she cried, as she followed him, panting in her fright.

He pushed her back gently from the threshold.

“Don’t be a little fool, Maggie.  I’m not ill.”

Out in the street, five yards from Maggie’s door, he battled with a vision of her that almost drove him back again.  “It was I who was a fool,” he thought.  “I shall go back.  Why not?  She is predestined.  Why not I as well as anybody else?”

All the way to his own door an insistent, abominable voice kept calling to him, “Why not?  Why not?”