“You might do so,” he continued—­“And it would not be wise!—­ neither for you in your career, nor for me in mine.  You are famous,—­your name is being talked of everywhere—­you must be very careful.  No one must know we are lovers.”

She thrilled at the word “lovers,” and her hand trembled in his.

“No one shall know,” she said.

“Not even Miss Leigh,” he insisted.

“If I say ‘no one’ of course I mean ‘no one,’” she answered, gently—­“not even Miss Leigh.”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it, relieved by this assurance.  He wanted his little “amour” to go on without suspicion or interference, and he felt instinctively that if this girl made any sort of a promise she would fulfil it.

“You can keep a secret then?” he said, playfully—­“Unlike most women!”

She looked up at him, smiling.

“Do men keep secrets better?” she asked.  “I think not!  Will you, for instance, keep mine?”

“Yours?” And for a moment he was puzzled, being a man who thought chiefly of himself and his own pleasure for the moment.  “What is your secret?”

She laughed.  “Oh, ‘Sieur Amadis’!  You pretend not to know!  Is it not the same as yours?  You must not tell anybody that I—­I—­”

He understood-and pressed hard the little hand he held.

“That you—­well?  Go on!  I must not tell anybody—­what?”

“That I love you!” she said, in a tone so grave and sweet and angelically tender, that for a second he was smitten with a sudden sense of shame.

Was it right to steal all this unspoilt treasure of love from a heart so warm and susceptible?  Was it fair to enter such an ivory castle of dreams and break open all the “magic casements opening on the foam, Of perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn”?  He was silent, having no response to give to the simple ardour of her utterance.  What he felt for her was what all men feel for each woman who in turn attracts their wandering fancies—­the desire of conquest and possession.  He was moved to this desire by the irritating fact that this girl had startled an apathetic public on both sides of the Atlantic by the display of her genius in the short space of two years—­whereas he had been more than fifteen years intermittently at work without securing any such fame.  To throw the lasso of Love round the flying Pegasus on which she rode so lightly and securely, would be an excitement and amusement which he was not inclined to forgo—­a triumph worth attaining.  But love such as she imagined love to be, was not in his nature—­he conceived of it merely as a powerful physical attraction which exerted its influence between two persons of opposite sexes and lasted for a certain time—­then waned and wore off—­and he recognised marriage as a legal device to safeguard a woman when the inevitable indifference and coldness of her mate set in, making him no longer a lover, but a household companion of