'But could the man do anything for her?' asked Trix. 'Something I said started you on this. The man I thought of would do nothing but make the bad worse. If she were mean first, he'd make her meaner; if she lied before, she'd have to lie more; and he'd--he'd break down the last of her woman's pride.' 'I don't mean a man like that.' 'No, and you're not thinking of a woman like me.' 'She'd have to take the place of the thing that had mastered him; he'd have to find more delight in her than in it; she'd have to take its place as the centre of his life.' He was thinking out his problem before her. At last Trix was stirred to curiosity. Did any man argue another's case like this? Was any man roused in this fashion by an abstract discussion? Or if he were dissuading her from the step she had hinted at, was not his method perversely roundabout? She looked at him with inquiring eyes. In answer he came across the room to her. 'Yet, if there were a man and a woman such as we've been speaking of, and there was half the shadow of a chance, oughtn't they to clutch at it? Oughtn't they to play the bold game? Ought they to give it up?' His excitement was unmistakable now. Again he looked in her eyes as he had once before. She could do nothing but look up at him, expecting what he would say next. But he drew back from her, seeming to repent of what he had said, or to retreat from its natural meaning. He wandered back to the hearthrug, and fingered the statement of her position that lay on the mantelpiece. He was frowning and smiling too; he looked very puzzled, very kindly, almost amused. 'Wouldn't they be fools not to have a shot?' he asked presently. 'Only she ought to know the truth first, and he'd find it deuced hard to tell her.' 'She would have found it very hard to tell him.' 'But she would have?' 'Yes--if she loved him,' said Trix, smiling. 'Confession and humiliation comfort women when they're in love. When they're not----' She shuddered. Presumably Barslett came into her mind. 'If he never told her at all, would that be fair?' 'She couldn't forgive that, if she found it out.' 'No?' 'Well, it would be very difficult.' 'But if she never found it out?' 'That would be the grandest triumph of all for her, perhaps,' said Trix very softly. For now, vague, undefined, ignorant still, but yet sure at its mark, had come the idea that somehow, for some reason, Airey Newton spoke not of Beaufort Chance, nor of another, not of some abstraction or some hypothetical man, but of his very self. 'My prayer to him would be not to tell me, and that I might never know on earth. If I knew ever, anywhere, then I should know too what God had let me do.' 'But if he never told you, and some day you found out?' Trix looked across at him--at his dreary smile and his knitted brow. She amended the judgment she had given a minute before: 'We could cry together, or laugh together, or something, couldn't we?' she asked.