And now, how to behave towards Nita? Of course he must not deceive her: he must try to enlighten her on the subject of his engagement; it was only fair. But not to-night: she was too shaken and unstrung to-night to bear more excitement—he tacitly assumed that the revelation would cause excitement to her—to-night he must be gentle and quiet, and let her rest. So he argued within himself, the truth being that to Jerome Wellfield it was very much easier and infinitely pleasanter to be on good than on evil terms with a woman—with all women not absolutely hideous, and that it was the most natural thing in the world for him to treat any young woman, especially if she happened to be the only one there, as if she were the object of his most special care and attention. Then too, he felt himself welcome at the Abbey, and the sense of this, and the luxury of the sympathy and commiseration, the admiration and the pity which Nita with every look, every gesture, every tone of her voice, offered to him, lulled him into a sensuous inactivity—the kind of inactivity to which his nature was always perilously prone. The pain of planning, and considering, and of conning over adverse circumstances, was great. The pleasure of half-dreamy talk with a woman whom some inner emotion made beautiful for the nonce, and who he felt wore that passing loveliness because he had called it there, and the pleasure of being worshipped, silently yet subtly, was also great, and very much easier to him than the other alternative. To-morrow, he thought, he would tell her about Sara; to-night he would tell her about herself. He went into the drawing-room, and found the group which has already been described. Nita’s little whispered dispute with John was over, and she lay still. The window was open, and Jerome had entered by it. The evening was warm, and at the Abbey in summer they never drew the curtains; and from where Nita lay, they could see the trees outside shimmering in the ghostly moonlight, and the hoary grey walls of the cloisters beside the river, and nearer, all the stiff quaint flower-beds, and clipped yews, and oddly-shaped shrubs and plants. Mr. Bolton, at the other end of the room, had a table and a little oasis of lamplight all to himself, and was absorbed in a book of travels. Nita was wont to say that her father was not happy unless he daily made an excursion to Burnham _in propria personâ_; a descent into Avernus with the assistance of Dante the immortal, and an expedition in the evening into some unheard-of corner of the earth with some traveller, whose tales she averred could not be too wonderful to be credible; in fact, the more improbable, the better. Except Mr. Bolton’s reading-lamp, there was no light in the room save moonlight; and the space was so great that the lamplight was lost in the other rays.