For that this was crisis, a definite thought-crisis, each of the participants in it--Julia, Aliette, Ronnie--recognized as they rose to their feet. Behind their conventionally smiling faces seethed minds so violently perturbed that to each it seemed impossible for thought to remain unbetrayed. "This is the woman," thought Julia Cavendish. "This is the woman whom Ronnie loves. Somehow I must save him from her. Somehow I must save them both. Otherwise it means ruin, absolute ruin. Disgrace!" But no thought of ruin troubled the lovers. "I can't let him go like this," thought the woman. "I can't lose him. I must speak. I must say, 'Ronnie, Ronnie, I don't hate you for loving me.'" And the man thought: "I wonder if she _is_ hating me. I wonder why she's so reserved, so aloof. I must find out. I must have a word with her. Just one word--alone." And he had his word, the barest whisper as their hands clasped: "May I telephone you to-night?" Only the tiniest pressure of Aliette's gloved fingers gave consent. 3 "It was the mater who insisted on my having a telephone," thought Ronnie. "The mater who furnished this room for me." He looked round the room--at the Chippendale settee, the bookcases, the eighteenth-century engravings on the beige wall-paper. Looking, his heart misgave him. The mater! He owed her so much in life. And now--now he was contemplating, more than contemplating, making definite, absolutely definite, a decision of which she could never approve, which might even cost him her love. The mater! Ever since that moment of crisis in Hyde Park--through luncheon, through the rainy afternoon which followed luncheon, over the dinner she had insisted on his sharing--Ronnie had been watching her face, speculating about her, wondering what she would say if she knew. Now suddenly it seemed to him that she did know. He tried to put the idea out of mind. But fragments of their conversation--fragments which memory could only imagine to have been hints--kept recurring to him. She had spoken--and this was rare with her--about his father; about a recent matrimonial shipwreck; about her article in the "Contemplatory." And not once, after Wilberforce left them, had she mentioned--Aliette! The Chippendale clock on the mantelpiece gave a preliminary wheeze, and began chiming ten o'clock. At the sound, misgivings vanished. She--not his mother, but Aliette, Aliette, the very thought of whose name made the pulses hammer in his head--must no longer be kept waiting. For a moment the shining black of the telephone fascinated Ronnie's eyes; for a moment, as one meditating a great decision, he stood stock-still. Then impulsively he lifted the receiver from its hook.