"I couldn't help it, it came over me yesterday that I couldn't stand it any longer. I've always said perpetual engagements would not answer, because people could never stand the awful monotony of them. It is only the monotony of Jack's love for me that has exhausted my patience now. If he had really been at all wild after we were engaged, which every one was so fond of prophesying to me, I think I might have got to love him too much to give him up. But--oh! it is the badness in me I think, Digby. Why don't you scold me instead of looking at me like that?" He stroked her hair idly without speaking, and she had to laugh again to hide the tremor in her lips. "I always told you I wanted our engagement kept secret; it would have been much better. It was an experiment, rather a disastrous one for Jack--" "And for you?" "--and it should never have been made public. Engagements never ought to be made public, and if they were what they claim to be they never would be. It is because they are such miserable, heartless arrangements that we have to take refuge in the approbation of society to make them a success at all; if it were not for the connivance of their friends I don't believe people would ever get to the marriage service at all. No wonder men say such hard things about women; we simply destroy all the sentiment that is in them by our eagerness to cash it at once, and then we go in for a cheap cynicism and call them heartless brutes. If I were a man I would never ask a woman to be my wife, never, never, never! At least, not if I were in love with her." She spoke rapidly and vehemently, and the musician framed her face in his hands and coughed a little to steady his voice. "Poor Jack!" he said almost inaudibly. "Why do you say that?" she asked, in the same tone. "Because he might have married you, and he has just missed it," he breathed in reply; and their heads drew closer together and remained so for a few seconds. They had had enough in their two lives to make them either sure friends or enemies. And morality is mainly a question of circumstance, and largely dependent on the chances of detection. "Why are you so good to me?" she asked. "Am I?" he said with a smile, and he removed one of his hands to brush off the ash of his cigarette. "I am only what you make me. I have always been in your hands, you know."