“Is this Mr. Brent’s?  Will you say to Mr. Brent that Mrs. Spence would be greatly, obliged if he stopped a moment at her house before going to town?  Thank you.”

She returned to her room and dressed with feverish haste, trying to gather her wits for an ordeal which she felt it would have killed her to delay.  At ten minutes to eight she emerged again and glanced anxiously at Mrs. Holt’s door; and scarcely had she reached the lower hall before he drove into the circle.  She was struck more forcibly than ever by the physical freshness of the man, and he bestowed on her, as he took her hand, the peculiar smile she knew so well, that always seemed to have an enigma behind it.  At sight and touch of him the memory of what she had prepared to say vanished.

“Behold me, as ever, your obedient servant,” he said, as he followed her into the screened-off portion of the porch.

“You must think it strange that I sent for you, I know,” she cried, as she turned to him.  “But I couldn’t wait.  I—­I did not know until last night.  Howard only told me then.  Oh, you didn’t do it for me!  Please say you didn’t do it for me!”

“My dear Honora,” replied Trixton Brent, gravely, “we wanted your husband for his abilities and the valuable services he can render us.”

She stood looking into his eyes, striving to penetrate to the soul behind, ignorant or heedless that others before her had tried and failed.  He met her gaze unflinchingly, and smiled.

“I want the truth,” she craved.

“I never lie—­to a woman,” he said.

“My life—­my future depends upon it,” she went on.  “I’d rather scrub floors, I’d rather beg—­than to have it so.  You must believe me!”

“I do believe you,” he affirmed.  And he said it with a gentleness and a sincerity that startled her.

“Thank you,” she answered simply.  And speech became very difficult.  “If—­if I haven’t been quite fair with you—­Mr. Brent, I am sorry.  I—­I liked you, and I like you to-day better than ever before.  And I can quite see now how I must have misled you into thinking—­queer things about me.  I didn’t mean to.  I have learned a lesson.”

She took a deep, involuntary breath.  The touch of lightness in his reply served to emphasize the hitherto unsuspected fact that sportsmanship in Trixton Brent was not merely a code, but assumed something of the grandeur of a principle.

“I, too, have learned a lesson,” he replied.  “I have learned the difference between nature and art.  I am something of a connoisseur in art.  I bow to nature, and pay my bets.”

“Your bets?” she asked, with a look.

“My renunciations, forfeits, whatever you choose to call them.  I have been fairly and squarely beaten—­but by nature, not by art.  That is my consolation.”

Laughter struck into her eyes like a shaft of sunlight into a well; her emotions were no longer to be distinguished.  And in that moment she wondered what would have happened if she had loved this man, and why she had not.  And when next he spoke, she started.