“If _I_ am, he won’t be!” she declared with a laugh. I admitted there might be something in that. The thing was therefore to get us safely married first. “That won’t help us. Nothing will help us!” she said as she kissed me farewell. “I shall never, never see him!” It was with those words she left me. I could bear her disappointment as I’ve called it; but when a couple of hours later I received him at dinner I found that I couldn’t bear his. The way my manoeuvre might have affected him had not been particularly present to me; but the result of it was the first word of reproach that had ever yet dropped from him. I say “reproach” because that expression is scarcely too strong for the terms in which he conveyed to me his surprise that under the extraordinary circumstances I should not have found some means not to deprive him of such an occasion. I might really have managed either not to be obliged to go out or to let their meeting take place all the same. They would probably have got on in my drawing-room without me. At this I quite broke down--I confessed my iniquity and the miserable reason of it. I had not put her off and I had not gone out; she had been there and after waiting for him an hour had departed in the belief that he had been absent by his own fault. “She must think me a precious brute!” he exclaimed. “Did she say of me--what she had a right to say?” “I assure you she said nothing that showed the least feeling. She looked at your photograph, she even turned round the back of it, on which your address happens to be inscribed. Yet it provoked her to no demonstration. She doesn’t care so much as all that.” “Then why are you afraid of her?” “It was not of her I was afraid. It was of you.” “Did you think I would fall in love with her? You never alluded to such a possibility before,” he went on as I remained silent. “Admirable person as you pronounced her, that wasn’t the light in which you showed her to me.” “Do you mean that if it _had_ been you would have managed by this time to catch a glimpse of her? I didn’t fear things then,” I added. “I hadn’t the same reason.” He kissed me at this, and when I remembered that she had done so an hour or two before I felt for an instant as if he were taking from my lips the very pressure of hers. In spite of kisses the incident had shed a certain chill, and I suffered horribly from the sense that he had seen me guilty of a fraud. He had seen it only through my frank avowal, but I was as unhappy as if I had a stain to efface. I couldn’t get over the manner of his looking at me when I spoke of her apparent indifference to his not having come.