Silence then, a long-drawn silence. “It is not long now. I am counting the days, the hours. You won’t say again I disappoint you, will you? You will bear with me?” She clung closer to him. Tonight he moved her strangely. “You really do love me?” she whispered. “I want to take care of you always. My dear, darling, how good you are to let me love you! One day I will be your husband! I dare hardly say the words. Promise me!” And again his lips sought hers. “Your husband and your lover....” An extraordinary chill came upon her. She could not herself say what had happened, the effect, but never the cause. She disengaged herself from him. When he saw she wanted to go he made no effort to hold her. “It is very late, isn’t it?” He made no answer, and she repeated the question. “It’s very late, isn’t it?” “I don’t know.” “I wish you would look.” He took out his watch. “Barely ten. You are tired?” “Yes, a little.” “Margaret, you say you are lonely in this house, nervous. Would you feel better if I patrolled the garden, if you felt I was at hand?” “Oh, no, no. I didn’t know what I was saying.” All her mood had changed. “I must have forgotten Stevens and the other maids.” Then she moved away from him, over to the round table where the dead lamp still gave an occasional flicker. She tried it this way and that, but there was no flame, only flicker. “You always take me so seriously, misunderstand me.” He came near her again. “I don’t think I misunderstand you,” he said tenderly. “I am sorry,” she answered vaguely. “It was my fault.” “Fault! You have not a fault!” “But now—I want you to go.” His eyes questioned and caressed her. “Until next week then.” He took her in his arms, but her lips were cold, unresponsive, it was almost an apology she made: “I am really so tired.” When he had gone, lying among the pillows on the sofa, she said to herself: “Greek roots! He is supposed to be more learned in Greek roots than any one in England. But the root word of this he missed entirely. REACTION. That is the root word. I don’t know what came over me. Why is he so unlike other men? What if such a moment had come to me with Peter Kennedy!” She smiled faintly all by herself in the firelight. How impossible it was that she should have played like this with Peter Kennedy. He moved her no more than a log of wood. Then she was suddenly ashamed, her cheeks dyed red in the darkness. CHAPTER X