What he did say was simple, and easy to hear.  “That’s what everybody will tell me; but I thought you might understand.”  He tapped the toe of his boot with his stick as if he counted the strokes.  She looked down and counted them too.

“Then you won’t help me to marry her?” he said, definitely, at last.

“What could I do?” She twisted her sapphire ring.  “Ask somebody else.”

“Don’t expect me to believe there is nothing you could do.  Go to her as my friend.  It isn’t such a monstrous thing to ask.  Tell her any good you know of me.  At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid colours of the lost.”

The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and the cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting Celine and the curling tongs.  She did not lose her elegance; the poise of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she looked too amusedly at his difficulty.  Her negative, too, was more unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.

“No,” she said.  “It must be somebody else.  Don’t ask me.  I should become involved—­I might do harm.”  She had surmounted her emotion; she was able to look at the matter with surprising clearness and decision.  “I should do harm,” she repeated.

“You don’t count with her effect on you.”

“You can’t possibly imagine her effect on me.  I’m not a man.”

“But won’t you take anything—­about her—­from me?  You know I’m really not a fool—­not even very impressionable?”

“Oh no!” she said impatiently.  “No—­of course not.”

“Pray why?”

“There are other things to reckon with.”  She looked coldly beyond him out of the window.  “A man’s intelligence when he is in love—­ how far can one count on it?”

There was nothing but silence for that, or perhaps the murmured, “Oh, I don’t agree,” with which Lindsay met it.  He rode down her logic with a simple appeal.  “Then after all,” he said, “you’re not my friend.”

It goaded her into something like an impertinence.  “After you have married her,” she said, “you’ll see.”

“You will be hers then,” he declared.

“I will be yours.”  Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested on a brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.

“And I thought you broad in these views,” Lindsay said, glancing at her curiously.  Her opportunity for defence was curtailed by a heavy step in the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon Major Livingstone, looking warm.  He, whose other name was the soul of hospitality, made a profound and feeling remonstrance against Lindsay’s going before tiffin, though Alicia, doing something to a bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear it.  Not that her added protest would have detained Lindsay, who took his perturbation away with him as quickly as might be.  Alicia saw the cloud upon him as he shook hands with her, and found it but slightly consoling to reflect that his sun would without doubt re-emerge in all effulgence on the other side of the door.