Helen rang the bell for the tea.

“Is that all you have to say to me?” she said, poutingly.

Maurice Kynaston looked distressed.

“Upon my word, Helen, I am sure I don’t know what you expect.  I haven’t heard any particular news.  I saw you only yesterday, you know.  I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Helen was silent.  She knew very well what she wanted, she wanted him to say and do things that were impossible to him—­to play the lover to her, to respond to her caresses, to look glad to see her.

Maurice was so tired of it all! tired alike of her reproaches and her caresses.  The first irritated him, the second gave him no pleasure.  There was no longer any attraction to him about her, her love was oppressive to him.  He did not want it, he had never wanted it; only somehow she had laid it so openly and freely at his feet, that it had seemed almost unmanly to him not to put forth his hand and take it.  And now he was tired of his thraldom, sick of her endearments, satiated with her kisses.  And what was it all to end in?  He could not marry her, he would not have desired to do so had he been able; but as things were, there was no money to marry on either side.  At his heart Maurice Kynaston was glad of it, for he did not want her for a wife, and yet he feared that he was bound to her.

Man-like, he had no courage to break the chains that bound him, and yet to-night he had said to himself that he would make the effort—­the state of his affairs furnished him with a sufficiently good pretext for broaching the subject.

“There is something I wanted to say to you,” he said, after the tea had been brought in and they were alone again.  He sat forward in his chair and stroked his moustache nervously, not looking at her as he spoke.

Helen came and sat on the hearthrug at his feet, resting her cheek caressingly against his knee.

“What is it, Maurice?”

“Well, it’s about myself.  I have been awfully hard hit this last week at Newmarket, you know.”

“Yes, so you told me.  I am so sorry, darling.”  But she did not care much as long as he was with her and was kind to her—­nothing else signified much to her.

“Yes, but I am pretty well broke this time—­I had to go to John again.  He is an awfully good fellow, is old John; he has paid everything up for me.  But I’ve had to promise to give up racing, and now I’ve got to live on my pay.”

“I could lend you fifty pounds.”

“Fifty pounds! pooh! what nonsense!  What would be the good of fifty pounds to me?”

He said it rather ungraciously, perhaps, and her eyes filled with tears.  When a man does not love a woman, her little childish offers of help do not touch him as they would if he loved her.  He would not have taken five thousand from her, yet he was angry with her for talking of fifty pounds.

“What I wanted to say to you, Helen, was that, of course, now I am so hard up it’s no good thinking of—­of marrying—­or anything of that kind; and don’t you think it would be happiest if you and I—­I mean, wisest for us both—­for you, of course, principally——­”