"Well, do you know what I think?" said Kendal, with an irrelevant smile, glancing at the letter in her hand. "I think she has kept a copy." Janet looked at him with reproachful eyes, which nevertheless had the relief of amusement in them. "Don't you?" he insisted. "I--dare say." "And she thoroughly enjoyed writing as she did. The phrases read as if she had rolled them under her tongue. It was a _coup_, don't you see?--and the making of a _coup_, of any kind, at any expense, is the most refined joy which life affords that young woman." "There's sincerity in every line." "Oh, she means what she says. But she found an exquisite gratification in saying it which you cannot comprehend, dear. This letter is a flower of her egotism, as it were--she regards it with natural ecstasy, as an achievement." Janet shook her head. "Oh no, no" she cried miserably. "You can't realize the--the sort of thing there was between us, dear, and how it should have been sacred to me beyond all tampering and cavilling, or it should not have been at all. It isn't that I didn't know all the time that I was disloyal to her, while she thought I was sincerely her friend. I did! And now she has found me out, and it serves me perfectly right--perfectly." Kendal reflected for a moment, and then he brought comfort to her from his last resource. "Of course the intimacy between two girls is a wholly different thing, and I don't know whether the relation between Miss Bell and myself affords any parallel to it--" "Oh, Jack! And I thought--" "What did you think, dearest?" "I thought," said Janet, in a voice considerably muffled by contact with his tweed coat collar, "that you were perfectly _madly_ in love with her." "Heavens!" Kendal cried, as if the contingency had been physically impossible. "It is a man's privilege to fall in love with a woman, darling--not with an incarnate idea." "It's a very beautiful idea." "I'm not sure of that--it looks well from the outside. But it is quite incapable of any growth or much, change," Kendal went on musingly, "and in the end--Lord, how a man would be bored!" "You are incapable of being fair to her," came from the coat collar. "Perhaps. I have something else to think of--since yesterday. Janet, look up!" She looked up, and for a little space Elfrida Bell found oblivion as complete as she could have desired between them. Then-- "You were telling me--" Janet said.