“It can’t be wrong to love you!  I don’t care if it is wrong,” and saw her lips quivering, and her eyes suddenly piteous and scared, as if for the first time she doubted of the issue.  Here was fresh torment!  To watch an unhappy child.  And what was the use of even trying to make clear to her—­on the very threshold of life—­the hopeless maze that he was wandering in!  What chance of making her understand the marsh of mud and tangled weeds he must drag through to reach her.  “Nobody need know.”  So simple!  What of his heart and his wife’s heart?  And, pointing to his new work—­the first man bewitched by the first nymph—­he said: 

“Look at this, Nell!  That nymph is you; and this man is me.”  She got up, and came to look.  And while she was gazing he greedily drank her in.  What a strange mixture of innocence and sorcery!  What a wonderful young creature to bring to full knowledge of love within his arms!  And he said:  “You had better understand what you are to me—­all that I shall never know again; there it is in that nymph’s face.  Oh, no! not your face.  And there am I struggling through slime to reach you—­not my face, of course.”

She said:  “Poor face!” then covered her own.  Was she going to cry, and torture him still more?  But, instead, she only murmured:  “But you have reached me!” swayed towards him, and put her lips to his.

He gave way then.  From that too stormy kiss of his she drew back for a second, then, as if afraid of her own recoil, snuggled close again.  But the instinctive shrinking of innocence had been enough for Lennan—­he dropped his arms and said: 

“You must go, child.”

Without a word she picked up her fur, put it on, and stood waiting for him to speak.  Then, as he did not, she held out something white.  It was the card for the dance.

“You said you were coming?”

And he nodded.  Her eyes and lips smiled at him; she opened the door, and, still with that slow, happy smile, went out. . . .

Yes, he would be coming; wherever she was, whenever she wanted him! . . .

His blood on fire, heedless of everything but to rush after happiness, Lennan spent those hours before the dance.  He had told Sylvia that he would be dining at his Club—­a set of rooms owned by a small coterie of artists in Chelsea.  He had taken this precaution, feeling that he could not sit through dinner opposite her and then go out to that dance—­and Nell!  He had spoken of a guest at the Club, to account for evening dress—­another lie, but what did it matter?  He was lying all the time, if not in words, in action—­must lie, indeed, to save her suffering!

He stopped at the Frenchwoman’s flower shop.

“Que desirez-vous, monsieur?  Des oeillets rouges—­j’en ai de bien beaux, ce soir.”

Des oeillets rouges?  Yes, those to-night!  To this address.  No green with them; no card!