“London. A hotel. Any old branch.” She smiled. “I must settle down somewhere sooner or later. The sooner the better.” “That’s monstrous,” he declared with a flash in his eyes. “To turn you out of your home—I should feel a scoundrel.” “I don’t see how we can go on living together, carrying on as usual, as though nothing had happened.” For a few moments they walked up the gravelled path in silence, both bareheaded in the mild May sunshine. “Listen,” he said, coming to a pause. “I’m a man who has learned self-control in three hard schools—my Scotch father’s, science, war. If I swear to you, on my honour, that nothing that has passed between us to-day shall ever be revived by me in look or word or act—will you stay with us, and give me your—your friendship—your companionship—your presence in the house? It was an aching desert all the time you were away.” She walked on a pace or two, after a hopeless sigh. Could she never drive into this unworldly head the fact that women were not sexless angels? How could their eyes forever meet in the glance of a polite couple discussing the weather across a tea-table? She could not resist a shaft of mockery. “For all of your philosopher father and science and war—I wonder, my dear Blaise, how much you really know of life?” He halted and put a hand on her slim shoulder. “I love you so much my dear,” said he, “that I should be content to hang crucified before you, so that my eyes could rest upon you till I died.” He turned and strode fast away. She followed him crying “Blaise! Blaise!” He half turned with an arresting arm—and even at that moment she was touched by the pathos of the other empty sleeve—— “No, don’t—please.” She ran hard and facing him blocked his way. “But what of me? What of my feelings while I saw you hanging crucified?” That point of view had not occurred to him. He looked at her embarrassed. His Scottish veracity asserted itself. “When a man’s mad in love,” said he, “he can’t think of everything.” She took his arm and led him up the gravelled path again. “Don’t you see, dear, how impossible it all is?” “Yes. I suppose so. It must be one thing or the other. And all that is good and true and honourable makes it the other.” Tears came at the hopelessness of it. She seized his hand in both of hers. “What you said just now is a thing no woman could forget to the day of her death.” She kissed the hand and let it drop, stirred to the inmost. What was she, ineffectual failure, to command the love of such a man? He stood for a while looking into the vacancy of the pale blue sky over the ivy-clad wall. Before her eyes garden and house and wall and sky were blotted out; and only the one tall figure existed in the scene. Her heart beat. It was a moment of peril, and the moment seemed like an hour. At last he turned and looked at her with his grave smile. She put her hand on her heart not knowing whether to cry or laugh at the relaxation of tension.