THE DUEL "BUT I wasn't doing any harm," she urged piteously. She looked like a child just going to cry. "He was holding your hand." "He wasn't--I was holding his. I was telling him his fortune. And, anyhow, it's not your business." She had remembered this late and phrased it carelessly. "It is my Master's business," said he. She repressed the retort that touched her lips. After all, there was something fine about this man, who, in the first month of his ministrations as Parish Priest, could actually dare to call on her, the richest and most popular woman in the district, and accuse her of--well, most people would hardly have gone so far as to call it flirting. Propriety only knew what the Reverend Christopher Cassilis might be disposed to call it. They sat in the pleasant fire-lit drawing-room looking at each other. "He's got a glorious face," she thought. "Like a Greek god--or a Christian martyr! I wonder whether he's ever been in love?" He thought: "She is abominably pretty. I suppose beauty _is_ a temptation." "Well," she said impatiently, "you've been very rude indeed, and I've listened to you. Is your sermon quite done? Have you any more to say? Or shall I give you some tea?" "I have more to say," he answered, turning his eyes from hers. "You are beautiful and young and rich--you have a kind heart--oh, yes--I've heard little things in the village already. You are a born general. You organise better than any woman I ever knew, though it's only dances and picnics and theatricals and concerts. You have great gifts. You could do great work in the world, and you throw it all away; you give your life to the devil's dance you call pleasure. Why do you do it?" "Is that your business too?" she asked again. And again he answered-- "It is my Master's business." Had she read his words in a novel they would have seemed to her priggish, unnatural, and superlatively impertinent. Spoken by those thin, perfectly curved lips, they were at least interesting. "That wasn't what you began about," she said, twisting the rings on her fingers. The catalogue of her gifts and graces was less a novelty to her than the reproaches to her virtue. "No--am I to repeat what I began about? Ah--but I will. I began by saying what I came here to say: that you, as a married woman, have no right to turn men's heads and make them long for what can never be." "But you don't know," she said. "My husband--" "I don't wish to know," he interrupted. "Your husband is alive, and you are bound to be faithful to him, in thought, word, and deed. What I saw and heard in the little copse last night--" "I do wish you wouldn't," she said. "You talk as if--" "No," he said, "I'm willing--even anxious, I think--to believe that you would not--could not--" "Oh," she cried, jumping up, "this is intolerable! How dare you!" He had risen too.