“As regards your personal attractions,” Tavernake replied, “I imagine that they are at least as great as ever.  If you want the truth, I think that the reason I do not adore you any longer is because I saw your sister last night.”

“Saw Beatrice!” she exclaimed.  “Where?”

“She was singing at a miserable east-end music-hall so that her father might find some sort of employment,” Tavernake said.  “The people only forbore to hiss her father’s turn for her sake.  She goes about the country with him.  Heaven knows what they earn, but it must be little enough!  Beatrice is shabby and thin and pale.  She is devoting the best years of her life to what she imagines to be her duty.”

“And how does this affect me?” Elizabeth asked, coldly.

“Only in this way,” Tavernake answered.  “You asked me how it was that I could find you as beautiful as ever and adore you no longer.  The reason is because I know you to be wretchedly selfish.  I believed in you before.  Everything that you did seemed right.  That was because I was a fool, because you had filled my brain with impossible fancies, because I saw you and everything that you did through a distorted mirror.”

“Have you come here to be rude?” she asked him.

“Not in the least,” he replied.  “I came here to see whether I was cured.”

She began to laugh, very softly at first, but soon she threw herself back among the cushions and laid her hand caressingly upon his shoulder.

“Oh, you are just the same!” she cried.  “Just the same dear, truthful bundle of honesty and awkwardness and ignorance.  So you are going to be victim of Beatrice’s bow and spear, after all.”

“I have asked your sister to marry me,” Tavernake admitted.  “She will not.”

“She was very wise,” Elizabeth declared, wiping the tears from her eyes.  “As an experience you are delightful.  As a husband you would be terribly impossible.  Are you going to stay and take me out to dinner this evening?  I’m sure you have a dress suit now.”

Tavernake shook his head.

“I am sorry,” he said.  “I have already an engagement.”

She looked at him curiously.  Was it really true that he had become indifferent?  She was not used to men who escaped.

“Tell me,” she asked, abruptly, “why did you come?  I don’t understand.  You are here, and you pass your time being rude to me.  I ask you to take me to dinner and you refuse.  Do you know that scarcely a man in London would not have jumped at such a chance?”

“Very likely,” Tavernake answered.  “I have no experience in such matters.  I only know that I am going to do something else.”

“Something you want to do very much?” she whispered.

“I am going down to a little music-hall in Whitechapel,” Tavernake said, “and I am going to meet your sister and I am going to put her in a cab and take her to have some supper, and I am going to worry her until she promises to be my wife.”