"Indeed--indeed you must," she whispered. He drew back sharply. "Miss Harden, won't you leave me a shred of self-respect?" "And what about mine?" said she. It was too much even for chivalry to bear. "That's not exactly my affair, is it?" He hardly realised the full significance of his answer, but he deemed it apt. If, as she had been so careful to point out to him, her honour and his moved on different planes, how could her self-respect be his affair? "It ought to be," she murmured in a tone whose sweetness should have been a salve to any wound. But he did not perceive its meaning any more than he had perceived his own, being still blinded by what seemed to him the cruelty and degradation of the final blow. She had stripped him; then she stabbed. To hide his shame and his hurt, he turned his face from her and left her. So strangely and so drunkenly did he go, with such a mist in his eyes, and such anguish and fury in his heart and brain, that on the threshold of the Harden library he stumbled past Miss Palliser without seeing her. She found Lucia standing where he had left her, looking at a little roll of pale green paper that her fingers curled and uncurled. "Lucia," she said, "what have you done to him?" Lucia let the little roll of paper fall from her fingers to the floor. "I don't know, Kitty. Something horrible, I think." BOOK III THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE CHAPTER XXXVII Mrs. Downey's boarding-house was the light of Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury. In the brown monotony of the street it stood out splendid, conspicuous. Its door and half its front were painted a beautiful, a remarkable pea-green, while its door knob and door-knocker were of polished brass. Mrs. Downey's boarding-house knew nothing of concealment or disguise. Every evening, at the hour of seven, through its ground-floor window it offered to the world a scene of stupefying brilliance. The blinds were up, the curtains half-drawn, revealing the allurements of the interior.