"Don't look so _empressé_ over it, Challis!" Really, this woman's faculty for going close to precipices, foot-sure, is something perfectly marvellous. Tenderness outright seemed the only natural sequel just now. But she will get back to safety, after gazing coolly over the edge. Trust her! "I couldn't say it all in one word, you see.... Never thought that in six months you would be writing a tragedy for me to play in. That's all that it comes to. At any rate, you seemed quite a different person then." Had she recoiled too abruptly from the precipice? Is there slight concession, just to accommodate a working equilibrium, in her last words? Her own working equilibrium, mind you;--in which to dangle her victim over that precipice at leisure, and yet to keep able to deny its proximity undisturbed, or pooh-pooh it altogether, at choice. For a thorough-paced female flirt enjoys driving her quarry mad best, when she knows she has plausible innocent unconsciousness enough left in the cellar to quench any fever of self-accusation of her own. "Who ever said a word, or thought a thought, about love-making?..." Don't we know the sort of thing? Challis's own frame of mind--for the story must needs try to define it, however difficult it is to deal with--was one of a sort of thankfulness that he had perturbation of feeling all to himself. Therein lay his safety; he could keep it secret. He could and would pay for it by additional tenderness to poor dear Polly Anne--who _was_ Polly Anne, after all, mind you!--when this last stupid bit of purposeless quarrelsomeness should have cleared away. But he wanted security that the conflagration whose smouldering he could not disguise from himself would be local. He had just, only just, stamped out a spark that might have become a flame at that precipice-edge, now a moment since. He was willing to go great lengths in persuading himself that there were no fires smouldering elsewhere; for to what end, in Heaven's name, should he recognize them? But suppose he should be forced to! Suppose he should find one day that he could no longer parade before his mind this creed that was his security--this impossibility that he was ever present in his absence to this woman; as he had to confess perforce, struggle as he might against growing conviction, she was so often--nearly always--present to him. He built this faith upon a rock of friendship, genial and firm, but always cold, that an exaggerated respect for her character--which really did him honour--chose to assign as the only leasehold her heart could accommodate him with. Perhaps unfounded hallucinations about the beauty of Judith's character were the most dangerous features of the disease Alfred Challis was sickening for, if it had not developed already.