“Me?  And her?”

“You and her.  You’ve come back to me as my friend.  We’ll be better friends if you understand that, whatever I let you do, dear, I’m not going to let you make love to me.”

She drew herself back and faced him with her resolution.

She knew the man with whom she had to deal.  His soul must be off its guard before she could have any power over his body.  In presenting herself as unattainable she would make herself desired.  She would bring him back.

She knew what fires he had passed through on his way to her.  She saw that she could not bring him back by playing poor, tender Maggie’s part.  She could not move him by appearing as the woman she once was, by falling at his feet as she had once fallen.  This time, it was he who must fall at hers.

Anne Majendie had held her empire, and had made herself for ever desirable, by six years of systematic torturings and deceptions and denials, by all the infidelities of the saint in love with her own sanctity.  The woman who was to bring him back now would have to borrow for a moment a little of Anne Majendie’s spiritual splendour.  She saw by his flaming face that she had suggested the thing she had forbidden.

“You think,” said she, “there isn’t any danger?  I don’t say there is.  But if there was, you’d never see it.  You’d never think of it.  You’d be up to your neck in it before you knew where you were.”

He moved impatiently.  “At any rate I know where I am now.”

“And I,” said she, in response to his movement, “mean that you shall stay there.”  She paused.  “I know what you’re thinking.  You’d like to know what right I have to say these things to you.”

“Well—­I’m awfully stupid—­”

“I earned the right fifteen years ago.  When a woman gives a man all she has to give, and gets nothing, there are very few things she hasn’t a right to say to him.”

“I’ve no doubt you earned your right.”

“I’m not reproaching you, dear.  I’m simply justifying the plainness of my speech.”

He stared at her, but he did not answer.

“Don’t think me hard,” said she.  “I’m saying these things because I care for you.  Because—­” She rose, and flung her arms out with a passionate gesture towards him.  “Oh, my dear—­my heart aches for you so that I can’t bear it.”

She came over to where he sat staring at her, staring half stupefied, half inflamed.  She stood beside him, and passed her hand lightly over his hair.

“I only want to help you.”

“You can’t help me.”

“I know I can’t.  I can only say hard things to you.”

She stooped, and her lips swept his hair.  For a moment love gave her back her beauty and the enchantment of her youth; it illuminated the house of flesh it dwelt in and inspired.  And yet she could not reach him.  His soul was on its guard.

“You’ve come back,” she whispered.  “You’ve come back.  But you never came till you were driven.  That’s how I thought you’d come.  When you were driven.  When there was nobody but me.”