Peignton shook his head, and a dreary travesty of a smile passed over his face. He was marvelling for the hundredth time at the extraordinary difference between a woman's sense of honour, and that of a man. He could have set his teeth and stolen his friend's wife, carrying her off boldly in the face of the world, prepared to pay the price, but it would have been impossible for him to continue a series of clandestine meetings, however innocent, and still hold out the hand of friendship. Cassandra was not the type of woman to desert her home and child. She had made a vow, and she would keep it, yet she could declare that she would be the stronger for such meetings. Poor darling! she meant it in all sincerity. He would never allow her the misery of discovering her mistake. "No," he said firmly. "Never that, Cassandra. It has to be all or nothing. There's no midway course possible for you and me. I love you; there's nothing in the wide world that counts with me, beside you. If you could trust yourself to me, I would swear to serve you until my death, and it would be joy, the truest joy I could know. It is for you to order, Cassandra, and I shall obey..." He felt her shrink in his arms; her voice trembled, but she forced herself to speak. "What do you mean? Say it plainly, Dane, please, quite plainly. Let me understand!" "If you will come with me, Cassandra, we'll go abroad. I'll take a villa in some quiet spot, out of the tourist beat. We could stay there, together, until... He would divorce you; he is not the kind of man to shirk that. The case would be undefended, so you would not have to appear... In less than a year we could be legally married." "But--but--_my boy_!" cried Cassandra, trembling. She passed her right hand against Peignton's shoulder, the hand with the emerald ring, and raised herself from his embrace. There was a look in her eyes which he had not seen before, the mother-look on guard for her young. It was not of the stolid, freckled-faced schoolboy that Cassandra was thinking at that moment, but of the small, soft-breathing thing which had been the reward of her anguish, which she had greeted with such a passion of joy. "Dane! have you forgotten my boy?" "No. I have forgotten nothing. Is the boy more to you than I am, Cassandra?" "No. No," she turned to him with eager penitence. "Not so much; not so much; but he is mine; I am responsible. And he is growing so big--in a few years he would understand. ... Even now the other boys--I have done very little for him in his life. I have been allowed to do so little, and he isn't affectionate. It isn't me personally that he would miss... a new gun, or a pony would more than make up _now_! But he _would_ care!... The time would come when he would be ashamed.--I couldn't bear my own little son to be ashamed of me, Dane!"