He too was angry. Feo had cheated and brought about the sort of crisis that should have been avoided. Any one who knew Fallaray’s detestation of personalities must have seen what this breaking down of his fourth wall would bring about. “Who do you mean by ‘we’?” demanded Fallaray. “Madame de Brézé and myself,” said Lytham. “What! You ask me to believe that Madame de Brézé has come here with you to persuade my wife to go back on her promise to set me free? What do you take me for?” He laughed at the utter absurdity of the idea and in doing so, broke the tension and the stiltedness of the scene, as he realized that Feo had deliberately intended it to become. And then, with a certain boyishness that went oddly with his monk-like face, he went over to Lola and put his hand on her shoulder. “All right,” he added. “Let’s have this out and come to a final understanding. It will save all further arguments. Just before you brought Lola here, having, as I can see, worked on her feelings by talking about your party and telling her that her coming into my life would ruin my career—I know your dogged enthusiasm, George—I saw my wife. I put my case to her at once and she agreed very generously to release me. A messenger will be here in ten minutes to take my statement to her lawyers and my resignation to the Prime Minister. I shall return to Chilton to-morrow to wait there, or wherever else it may suit me, until the end of the divorce proceedings. You won’t agree with me, but that is what I call doing the sane thing. Finally, all going well, as please God it may, this lady and I will get married and live happily ever after.” He spoke lightly, even jauntily, but with an undercurrent of emotion that it was impossible for him to disguise. And then, to Feo’s complete amazement, Lola, who had been so quiet and unobtrusive, rose and backed away from Fallaray, her face as white as the stone figures at Chilton under moonlight, her hands clasped together to give her strength, her eyes as dry as an empty well. She was bereft of tears. “But I am not going to marry you,” she said, “because if I do everything will go badly.” Fallaray sprang forward to take her in his arms and kiss her into love and life and acquiescence, as he had done before,—once at the gate and once again last night under the stars. But she backed away and ranged herself with Lytham. “I love Fallaray,” she said. “Fallaray the leader, the man who is needed, the man who has made himself necessary. If I were to marry Fallaray the deserter, there would be no such thing as happiness for me or for him.”