“I can tell you at once that there’s precious little money in bricks.  I’m fighting against big odds, and if I were worrying about you—­if you had enough to live upon and all that—­I couldn’t give proper attention to business.”

“It would be heaven for me,” she remarked.

“So you say now.  All I ask you to do is to trust implicitly in me and wait.”

“How long?” she gasped.

“I can’t say for certain.  It all depends.”

“On what?”

“Circumstances.”

She did not speak for some moments, the while she repressed an impulse to throw herself at his feet, and implore him to reconsider his indefinite promise.

“Will you pour me out a little whisky?” she said presently.

“What about your face?  It might make it throb.”

“I’ll chance that.”

“Aren’t you well, little Mavis?” he asked kindly.

“Not very.  It must be the heat of the room.”

She gulped down the spirit, to feel the better for it.  It seemed to give her heart to face her misfortunes.  She could say no more just then, as a man came into the room to lay the table.

Whilst this operation was in progress, she thought of the unlooked-for situation in which she found herself.  It was not so very long since Perigal was the suppliant, she the giver; now, the parts were reversed, except that, whereas she had given without stint, he withheld that which every wholesome instinct of his being should urge him to bestow without delay.

She wondered at the reason of the change, till the words he had spoken on the day of their jaunt to Broughton occurred to her: 

“No sooner was one want satisfied than another arose to take its place.  It’s a law of nature that ensures the survival of the fittest, by making men always struggle to win the desire of the moment.”

She had been Perigal’s desire, but, once won, another had taken its place, which, so far as she could see, was sea-fishing.  She smiled grimly at the alteration in his taste.  Then, an idea illuminated, possessed her mind.

“Why not make myself desirable so that he will be eager to win me again,” she thought.

So Mavis, despite the pain in her face, which owing to the spirit she had drunk was beginning to trouble her again, set out on the most dismal of all feminine quests—­that of endeavouring to make a worldly, selfish man pay the price of his liberty, and endure poverty for that which he had already enjoyed to the full.  With a supreme effort of will, she subdued her inclination to unrestrained despair; with complete disregard of the acute pain in her head, she became gay, light-hearted, irresponsible, joyous.  There was an undercurrent of suffering in her simulated mirth, but Perigal did not notice it; he was taken by surprise at the sudden change in her mood.  He responded to her supposititious merriment; he laughed and joked as irrepressibly as did Mavis.