As they leaned over a book of coloured prints of Gainsborough, Romney, and Vandyke, her soft, warm breast touched his arm and shoulder, a strand of her cobweb, golden hair swept his cheek, and a sigh came from her lips, so like those of that lass who caught and held her Nelson to the end, and died at last in poverty, friendless, homeless, and alone.  Did he fancy that he heard a word breathing through her sigh—­his name, Ian?  For one instant the wild, cynical desire came over him to turn and clasp her in his arms, to press those lips which never but once he had kissed, and that was when she had plighted her secret troth to him, and had broken it for three million pounds.  Why not?  She was a woman, she was beautiful, she was a siren who had lured him and used him and tossed him by.  Why not?  All her art was now used, the art of the born coquette which had been exquisitely cultivated since she was a child, to bring him back to her feet—­to the feet of the wife of Rudyard Byng.  Why not?  For an instant he had the dark impulse to treat her as she deserved, and take a kiss “as long as my exile, as sweet as my revenge”; but then the bitter memory came that this was the woman to whom he had given the best of which he was capable and the promise of that other best which time and love and life truly lived might accomplish; and the wild thing died in him.

The fever fled, and his senses became as cold as the statue of Andromeda on the pedestal at his hand.  He looked at her.  He did not for the moment realize that she was in reality only a girl, a child in so much; wilful, capricious, unregulated in some ways, with the hereditary taint of a distorted moral sense, and yet able, intuitive and wise, in so many aspects of life and conversation.  Looking, he determined that she should never have that absolution which any outward or inward renewal of devotion would give her.  Scorn was too deep—­that arrogant, cruel, adventitious attribute of the sinner who has not committed the same sin as the person he despises—­

“Sweet is the refuge of scorn.”

His scorn was too sweet; and for the relish of it on his tongue, the price must be paid one way or another.  The sin of broken faith she had sinned had been the fruit of a great temptation, meaning more to a woman, a hundred times, than to a man.  For a man there is always present the chance of winning a vast fortune and the power that it brings; but it can seldom come to a woman except through marriage.  It ill became him to be self-righteous, for his life had not been impeccable—­

“The shaft of slander shot
Missed only the right blot!”

Something of this came to him suddenly now as she drew away from him with a sense of humiliation, and a tear came unbidden to her eye.