‘Then why did you try to save me?’ she inquired. ‘I didn’t try; not really. I only pretended to.’ ‘Who was that for?’ ‘Myself, I suppose. It would have been easier to think of afterwards, you see: that I--tried.’ Here she saw that he had given her a bit of the real Jonathan wrongly applied. ‘Ah, yes,’ she commented, ‘you manage to pretend to yourself a good deal, don’t you? I wish I could!’ Her voice was gentle, regretful, full of compassion and understanding. ‘What would you like to pretend?’ it encouraged him to ask. Then she smote him. ‘That I believed you,’ she said. So the victory was won. He lay back, exhausted of his attempt. He had not escaped her after all; and his final word was uttered without any hope of reversing the issue now decided. ‘Well, I’ve told you,’ he said, trying to appear indifferent; ‘and it’s true,--every word.’ ‘Then we won’t talk about it,’ she replied; ‘you can think it’s true, if it amuses you. It would amuse me too, if I’d got the gift for it.’ She looked at him kindly, humorously; and then, speaking as one who tries to chaff foolish fancies out of a child, said: ‘Some day, Jonathan, you’ll look in the glass and be thinking you’ve got a halo; and it’ll only be the moon behind you, or a haystack on fire, or something of that kind. If I’d got an imagination like yours, I should be afraid to believe anything!’ So she shut him down with his poor weak wish to be privately and confidentially honest. And as he lay back in the cage of her contemptuous affections, he realized how very nearly he had escaped. If he had only been content to tell merely the truth, Davidina might have believed him: but at the last moment his Devil--his decorative Devil--had tempted him to play the murderer; and to the lurid beauty of it he had succumbed. He turned his head away on the pillow, for there were tears in his eyes. Davidina said: ‘It’s time you took your medicine.’ She poured it out as she spoke, and set it beside him, with the two lumps of sugar that were to follow. ‘I don’t want it,’ he cried peevishly. ‘Anyway, I don’t want it just yet: you can leave it.’ ‘No, I can’t; I’m going downstairs.’ ‘Well, you can leave it, I say.’ ‘And you’d empty it away and eat the sugar as soon as my back was turned. I know. You’ve done that before.’ It was true he had: but all humans of my acquaintance do similar things when left to themselves. It is their nature. But it was Davidina’s devouring instinct for not leaving him to himself which made him desperate. ‘Davidina,’ he cried, ‘why can’t you be friends?’ ‘Friends?’ she retorted, ‘you are too anxious to be friends with yourself, to be a safe friend for anyone else, I’m thinking. The best friend for you is some one who knows how to make you honest to ’em from a distance.’ She gave him his medicine as she spoke, and saw him drink it. ‘Well, there’s one thing you’re honest about at any rate,’ she said. ‘What’s that?’ he inquired, hopefully.