"But you are foolish," she declared, laying her hand upon his and smiling into his face, so that the madness came back and burned in his blood. "There is no need for you to be a gambler, there is no need for you to stake everything upon these single coups. You haven't felt the call. Don't listen for it." "Fenella," he whispered hoarsely, "what was I doing when Samuel Weatherley was shipwrecked on your island!" She laughed. "Oh, you foolish boy!" she cried. "What difference would it have made?" "You can't tell," he answered. "Has no one ever moved you, Fenella? Have you never known what it is to care for any one?" "Never," she replied. "I only hope that I never shall." "Why not?" "Because I am a gambler," she declared; "because to me it would mean risking everything. And I have seen no man in the whole world strong enough and big enough for that. You are my very dear friend, Arnold, and you are feeling very sentimental, and your head is turned just a little, but after all you are only a boy. The taste of life is not yet between your teeth." He leaned closer towards her. She put his arm gently away, shaking her head all the time. "Do not think that I am a prude," she said. "You can kiss me if you like, and yet I would very much rather that you did not. I do not know why. I like you well enough, and certainly it is not from any sense of right or wrong. I am like Andrea in that way. I make my own laws. To-night I do not wish you to kiss me." She was looking up at him, her eyes filled with a curious light, her lips slightly parted. She was so close that the perfume in which her clothes had lain, faint though it was, almost maddened him. "I don't think that you have a heart at all!" he exclaimed, hoarsely. "It is the old selfish cry, that," she answered. "Please do not be foolish, Arnold. Do not be like those silly boys who only plague one. With you and me, things are more serious." The car came to a standstill before the portals of Pelham Lodge. Arnold held her fingers for a moment or two after he had rung the bell. Then he turned away. She called him back. "Come in with me for a moment," she murmured. "To-night I am afraid. Mr. Weatherley will be in bed. Come in and sit with me for a little time until my courage returns." He followed her into the house. There seemed to Arnold to be a curious silence everywhere. She looked in at several rooms and nodded. "Mr. Weatherley has gone to bed," she announced. "Come into my sitting-room. We will stay there for five minutes, at least." She led the way across the hall towards the little room into which she had taken Arnold on his first visit. She tried the door and came to a sudden standstill, shook the handle, and looked up at Arnold in amazement. "It seems as though it were locked," she remarked. "It's my own sitting-room. No one else is allowed to enter it. Groves!" She turned round. The butler had hastened to her side.