She stood there under the dim hall-light, a girlish creature in her white dress, but with wonderful colour blooming in her cheeks. He could not know that hate had brought it there. She seemed to him the flower of her own beauty, rich, overpowering. She held the door open for him, and when he had followed her into the library, she turned and put both her hands upon his arm, her soft nearness like a perfume and a breath. To Reardon, she was immeasurably beautiful and as far as that above him. His heart beating terribly in his ears, he drew her to him sure that, in her aloofness, she would reprove him. But Esther, to his infinite joy and amazement, melted into his arms and clung there. "God!" said Reardon. She heard him saying it more than once as if entirely to himself and no smaller word would do. "You don't--" he said to her then, "you don't--care about me? It ain't possible." Reardon had reverted to oldest associations and forgotten his verb. She did not tell him whether she cared about him. She did not need to. The constraining of her touch was enough, and presently they were sitting face to face, he holding her hands and leaning to hear her whispered words. For she had immediately her question ready: "Do you think I ought to live like this--afraid?" "Afraid?" asked Reardon. "Of him?" "Yes. He came this afternoon. There is nobody to stand between us. I am afraid." Reardon made the only answer possible, and felt the thrill of his own adequacy. "I'll stand between you." "But you can't," she said. "You've no right." "There's but one thing for you to do," said Reardon. "Tell what you're telling me to a lawyer. And I'll--" he hesitated. He hardly knew how to put it so that her sense of fitness should not be offended. "I'll find the money," he ended lamely. The small hands stayed willingly in his. Reardon was a happy man, but at the same time he was curiously ashamed. He was a clean man who ate moderately and slept well and had the proper amount of exercise, and this excess of emotion jarred him in a way that irritated him. He did blame Jeff, who was at the bottom of this beautiful creature's misery. Still, if Jeff had not left her, she would not be sitting here now with the white hands in his. But he was conscious of a disturbing element of the unlawful, like eating a hurtful dish at dinner. Reardon had lived too long in a cultivating of the middle way to embark with joyousness on illicit possessing. As the traditions of Addington were wafting Alston Choate away from this primitive little Circe on her isle, so his acquired habits of safe and healthful living were wafting him. If his inner refusals could have been spoken crudely out they would have amounted to a miserable plea: "Look here. It ain't because I don't want you. But there's Jeff."