"Not if I can stop decently still," was his dogged reply. "But you don't know yet that you can." "You don't know that I can't, sir." I couldn't enter into that. If I had ever intended to do so the time for it would have been on that Sunday afternoon behind the rugosa roses. "You actually mean that you want me to take you to the house, and introduce you to Mrs Aird, and open up the way to--God knows what?" I demanded incredulously. "You offered to introduce me to Mrs Aird once before." "I offered to introduce the man I then knew." "Am I any worse now?" "There's no question of better or worse. A thing can be done or it can't, and this can't." "Do you mean because of my clothes and my being a Frenchman and all that?" "I mean, simply, your being Derwent Rose. And I don't know that the other things are quite as simple as they look either." "But I'm English really. And I've got a decent suit of English clothes." "Do they fit you--or did they merely do so once?" At this he became almost cross. "Look here, sir," he said, "when everything's said I _am_ me, and I feel pretty sure I can stop as I am. Dash it, I _am_ on the blessed map! I'm quite a passable nineteen as fellows go, and the rest's all rubbishy detail." Then his manner changed. His voice suddenly shook. "You see, I'm--I'm--I'm in it, George. Regularly for it. Just as deep as--oh, deep and lovely! I didn't know there was such a thing. There wasn't, not before.... Not just to speak to her? Not just to see her? Not if I promise faithfully not to say a single word about it, not even touch her finger? Not if I promise to cut and run at the very first sign of a change? Can't you manage that, sir? Am I such a rotten outcast as all that? It would be quite safe--I wouldn't say a word anybody couldn't hear--I'd promise--on my soul I'd promise----" I had got up and begun to pace agitatedly back and forth. How could I have him at the Airds'--and yet how resist his supplication? How refuse what would have been my very heart's desire for him--yet how grant it to the ruin of her young life as well as of his? I felt his eyes on my face. He knew, the rascal, that he had moved me, and was greedily looking for the faintest hint of my yielding. Yet the impossibility!... I stopped before him. "There's one thing that settles it if nothing else did," I said gently. "Miss Aird's probably off in a couple of days." It was, of course, a flagrant invention. I had thought of it on the spur of the moment. But it could be made true if necessary, I thought. He stared at me blankly. "Off! Did you say off?" "Right away. And it's now nearly two o'clock, and I want you to make me a promise before I leave you." "Off!" he repeated stupidly, as if he had imagined her fixed for all eternity as he had seen her in that moment by the car. "I'll bring your money round to-morrow at ten o'clock. I want you to promise to wait in your room for me till then." "Where is she going?"