“Please look at me,” he begged, a little abruptly.

She turned her head in some surprise.  Francis was almost handsome in the clear Spring sunlight, his face alight with animation, his deep-set grey eyes full of amused yet anxious solicitude.  Even as she appreciated these things and became dimly conscious of his eager interest, her perturbation seemed to grow.

“Well?” she ventured.

“Do I look like a person who knew what he was talking about?” he asked.

“On the whole, I should say that you did,” she admitted.

“Very well, then,” he went on cheerfully, “believe me when I say that the shadow which depresses you all the time now will pass.  I say this confidently,” he added, his voice softening, “because I hope to be allowed to help.  Haven’t you guessed that I am very glad indeed to see you again?”

She came to a sudden standstill.  They had just passed through Lansdowne Passage and were in the quiet end of Curzon Street.

“But you must not talk to me like that!” she expostulated.

“Why not?” he demanded.  “We have met under strange and untoward circumstances, but are you so very different from other women?”

For a single moment she seemed infinitely more human, startled, a little nervous, exquisitely sympathetic to an amazing and unexpected impression.  She seemed to look with glad but terrified eyes towards the vision of possible things—­and then to realise that it was but a trick of the fancy and to come shivering back to the world of actualities.

“I am very different,” she said quietly.  “I have lived my life.  What I lack in years has been made up to me in horror.  I have no desire now but to get rid of this aftermath of years as smoothly and quickly as possible.  I do not wish any man, Mr. Ledsam, to talk to me as you are doing.”

“You will not accept my friendship?”

“It is impossible,” she replied.

“May I be allowed to call upon you?” he went on, doggedly.

“I do not receive visitors,” she answered.

They were walking slowly up Curzon Street now.  She had given him every opportunity to leave her, opportunities to which he was persistently blind.  Her obstinacy had been a shock to him.

“I am sorry,” he said, “but I cannot accept my dismissal like this.  I shall appeal to your father.  However much he may dislike me, he has at least common-sense.”

She looked at him with a touch of the old horror in her coldly-questioning eyes.

“In your way you have been kind to me,” she admitted.  “Let me in return give you a word of advice.  Let me beg you to have nothing whatever to do with my father, in friendship or in enmity.  Either might be equally disastrous.  Either, in the long run, is likely to cost you dear.”

“If that is your opinion of your father, why do you live with him?” he asked.

She had become entirely callous again.  Her smile, with its mocking quality, reminded him for a moment of the man whom they were discussing.