She had risen, and he could find no words to stay her. It seemed that the battle to possess her was over, and that he, had lost. Her desire for his friendship had all the mockery of freedom in it to him--in the agony of the moment it insulted him. With an effort he controlled himself--there should be no more of the futility of words. He must see the last of her some time--let it be now, then. He bent his head over the slender hand he held, brought his lips to it, and then, with sudden passion, kissed it hotly again and again, seeking the warm, uncovered little spot above the fastening. Elfrida snatched it away with a little shiver at the contact, a little angry shiver of surprised nerves. He looked at her piteously, struggling for a word, for any word to send away her repulsion, to bring her back to the mood of the moment before. But he could not find it; he seemed to have drifted hopelessly from her, to have lost all his reckonings. "Well?" she said. She was held there partly by her sense of pity and partly by her desire to see the last, the very last of it. "Go!" he returned, with a shrinking of pain at the word, "I cannot." "_Pauvre ami!_" she said softly, and then she turned, and her light steps sounded back to him through the length of the hall. She walked more slowly when she reached the pavement outside, and one who met her might have thought she indulged in a fairly pleasant reverie. A little smile curved about the corners of her mouth, half compassionate, half amused and triumphant. She had barely time to banish it when she heard Cardiff's step beside her, and his voice. "I had to come after you," he said; "I've let you carry off my stick." She looked at him in mischievous challenge of his subterfuge, and he added frankly, with a voice that shook a little notwithstanding-- "It's of no use--I find I must accept your compromise. It is very good of you to be willing to make one. And I can't let you go altogether, Elfrida." She gave him a happy smile. "And now," she said, "shall we talk of something else?" CHAPTER XXIX.