"No, don't pull the curtains," she said, quickly, "and don't kiss me here, because people might see you from the street. I didn't ask you to come in here to make love." Perhaps a sense of the theater had always been dormant in Norah, for she went on as if she were making a set speech; but Wilfred was much too deep in love to let the cynicism upon which he plumed himself apply to her, and he listened humbly. "We can't go on like this forever," she wound up. "We must be engaged openly. I told father that last night, but he won't hear of it, so what are we to do?" "Darling, I'm ready to do anything." "Oh, anything!" she repeated, petulantly. "What is anything? He'll be here in a minute, and you've got to tell him that unless he consents to our being engaged you'll persuade me to elope." "Do you think he'd give way then?" Wilfred asked, doubtfully. He was very much in love with Norah, but he could not help remembering that he, too, had a father who, after an argument every Sunday evening, still allowed him ten shillings a week for pocket-money. If he were to elope, he should not only be certain to lose that supplement to his own earnings, but he should also involve in deeper discredit the profession he had adopted instead of the law, which Mr. Curlew, senior, had designed him to enter by way of the office of an old friend who was a solicitor. Norah wished that her father would come in and interrupt what should have been a passionate scene, but which was in reality as cold as the room where it was being played. She watched herself and Wilfred, whom the incandescent gas did not set off to advantage, in the large mirror that formed the over-mantel of the fireplace, and she realized now, as she had never realized before in her life, how amazingly she stood out from her surroundings. "You haven't kissed me once this evening," Wilfred began; but she shook herself free from his tentative embrace, and with one eye on the door for her father's entrance and the other on the mirror, or rather with both eyes at one moment on the door and immediately afterward on the mirror--a movement which displayed their brilliancy and depth--she went on enumerating to her suitor the material difficulties that made their engagement so hopeless. "But I'm getting on," he insisted. "The editor was very pleased with the way I handled that Kentish Town murder. They don't consider me at all a dud in Fleet Street. I'm sure I give everybody in this house quite a wrong impression of myself because I feel nervous and awkward when I'm here; but I don't think there's really much doubt that in another couple of years I shall be in quite a different position financially. Besides, I hope to do original work, and if a friend of mine can raise the money to start this new weekly--" "Oh, if, if, if!" interrupted Norah, impatiently. "Norah, don't you love me any more?" "Of course I love you," she said. "Don't be so stupid." "You seem different to-night."