And postponed it very late indeed.  Until the choice was no longer between making love in idleness, and conscientiously holding aloof; but between acting like a frank blackguard, and making the amends of an honest man.

The girl’s fault, to be sure.  He had not credited himself with this power of fascination, and certainly not with the violence of passion which recklessly pursues indulgence.  Still, the girl’s fault; she had behaved—­well, as a half-educated girl of her class might be expected to behave.  Ignorance she could not plead; that were preposterous.  Utter subjugation by first love; that, perhaps; she affirmed it, and possibly with truth; a flattering assumption, at all events.  But, all said and done, the issue had been of her own seeking.  Why, then, accuse himself of blackguardly conduct, if he had turned a deaf ear to her pleading?  Not one word of marriage had previously escaped his lips, nor anything that could imply a promise.

Well, there was the awkward and unaccountable fact that he felt himself obliged to marry her; that, when he seemed to be preparing resistance, downright shame rendered it impossible.  Her face—­her face when she looked at him and spoke!  The truth was, that he had not hesitated at all; there was but one course open to him.  He gave glances in the other direction; he wished to escape; he reviled himself for his folly; he saw the difficulties and discontents that lay before him; but choice he had none.

Love, in that sense of the word which Tarrant respected, could not be said to influence him.  He had uttered the word; yes, of course he had uttered it; as a man will who is goaded by his raging blood.  But he was as far as ever from loving Nancy Lord.  Her beauty, and a certain growing charm in her companionship, had lured him on; his habitual idleness, and the vagueness of his principles, made him guilty at last of what a moralist would call very deliberate rascality.  He himself was inclined to see his behaviour in that light; yet why had Nancy so smoothed the path of temptation?

That her love was love indeed, he might take for granted.  To a certain point, it excused her.  But she seemed so thoroughly able to protect herself; the time of her green girlhood had so long gone by.  For explanation, he must fall back again on the circumstances of her origin and training.  Perhaps she illustrated a social peril, the outcome of modern follies.  Yes, that was how he would look at it.  A result of charlatan ‘education’ operating upon crude character.

Who could say what the girl had been reading, what cheap philosophies had unsettled her mind?  Is not a little knowledge a dangerous thing?

Thus far had he progressed in the four and twenty hours which followed his—­or Nancy’s—­conquest.  Meanwhile he had visited the office of the registrar, had made his application for a marriage licence, a proceeding which did not tend to soothe him.  Later, when he saw Nancy again, he experienced a revival of that humaner mood which accompanied his pledge to marry her, the mood of regret, but also of tenderness, of compassion.  A tenderness that did not go very deep, a half-slighting compassion.  His character, and the features of the case, at present allowed no more; but he preferred the kindlier attitude.