He believed her revulsions of propriety to be sincere, but felt she had no business with so many, especially since he offered her every assistance to avoid the need of them. He respected her for the first, pitied her for the second, endured the third in silence, and then began to hate them. He did not expect a woman to know her own mind, but he thought her ignorance might be more agreeable. So passed what was for Terence a very melancholy winter. He bore it with a resignation nerved by the near prospect of escape to a berth in Paris, which had been as good as promised him when it became vacant. Meanwhile Downing Street saw more of him than usual, and he took every opportunity of immersing himself still deeper in his work. The post he had been expecting became available in March, and, too modest to urge his claim or to remind his patron, he was mortified to find one morning that it had been filled by another. He accepted his ill-fortune silently, and only learnt a month later to whom he owed it. He was enlightened then by accident, the peer, in whose gift the appointment practically lay, happening to express a regret that Terence had not seen his way to accept it. "To accept it!" he replied, laughing. "It wasn't offered me." "It wasn't offered you," said the other slowly, "because a certain friend of yours told me you had determined definitely, for the present, not to leave England." Terence met the speaker's searching glance, which smouldered with admonition. "I see," he smiled. "My own fault entirely." He understood to whom the "certain friend" referred, as well as the warning against feminine influence in his chief's eye; and, for a moment of sick disappointment, he burned to confront the woman who had betrayed him with his knowledge of her perfidy, to fling this piece of unimagined baseness in her face, and so be rid of her. But he realized ruefully within an hour that no such release was possible, at least for him. She had but done this thing to keep him near her. She would plead that to stoop to such an act of treachery to the one who was dearest to her only proved how ungovernable was her love. There would be another horrible scene. She would threaten again to kill herself. And in the end he would succumb. Each sacrifice he had made for her only committed him to a fresh one. She had cultivated weakness in order to revel in his strength; he had pauperized her with his soul. Had she been a woman of rages, of pride, of resentments, it would have proved another matter; but how was it possible to hurt a thing that clung about one's neck. So he said no more of his discomfiture, bitter as it was to his ambition as well as to his hopes of freedom. Her querulous exactions had already alienated his sympathies, so that it was no harder now to be kind to her than it had been before.