“You’d better let her bathe it now, because I’m not going in a moment.”

“When I ask you to go you will go.”

“Sit down.  I must speak to you.”

He pointed to a large sofa.  She went very deliberately to a chair and sat down.

“Why don’t you sit on the sofa?”

“I prefer this.”

He sat on the sofa.

“I must speak to you about Jimmy.”

“Well?”

“What’s the matter with him?  What have you been up to with him?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why should he turn against me and not against you?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You do.  It’s since that night in the garden when you made me lie to him.  Ever since that night he’s been absolutely different with me.  You know it.”

“I can’t help it.”

“He believed your lies to him, apparently.  Why doesn’t he believe mine?”

“Of course he believed what you told him.”

“He didn’t, or he wouldn’t have changed.  He hates your having anything to do with me.  He’s told you so.  I’m sure of it.”

“Jimmy would never dare to do that.”

“Anyhow, you know he does.”

She did not deny it.

“Remember this,” Dion said, looking straight at her, “I’m not going to be sacrificed a second time on account of a child.”

After a long pause, during which Mrs. Clarke sat without moving, her lovely head leaning against a cushion which was fastened near the top of the back of the chair, she said: 

“What do you mean exactly by being sacrificed, Dion?”

Her manner had changed.  The hostility had gone out of it.  Her husky voice sounded gentle almost, and she looked at him earnestly.

“I mean just this:  my life with the woman I once cared for was smashed to pieces by a child, my own dead child.  I’m not going to allow my life with you to be smashed to pieces by Jimmy.  Isn’t a man more than a child?  Can’t he feel more than a child feels, give more than a child can give?  Isn’t a thing full grown as valuable, as worth having as a thing that’s immature?”

He spoke with almost passionate resentment.

“D’you mean to tell me that a man’s love always means less to a woman than a child’s love means?”

Silently, while he spoke, she compared the passion she had had for Dion Leith with the love she would always have for Jimmy.  The one was dead; the other could not die.  That was the difference between such things.

“The two are so different that it is useless to compare them,” she replied.  “Surely you could not be jealous of a child.”

“I could be jealous of anything that threatened me in my life with you.  It’s all I’ve got now, and I won’t have it interfered with.”

“But neither must you attempt to interfere with my life with my child,” she said, very calmly.

“You dragged me into your life with Jimmy.  You have always used Jimmy as a means.  It began long ago in London when you were at Claridge’s.”