She gave a little scream. 'Sick! my dear Chris! that settles it. I can't have you bringing back microbes. It--it isn't fair on _us_, you know. And there are a lot of jolly globe-trotters at the hotel--one of them says he knew me in London.' There was a world of regret in her tone, and the pity of it, the hideous mistake for _her_ came home to Chris. 'There is no reason,' he said, in a sort of despair, 'why I should turn you out of this'--here he gave a hard sort of laugh--'I don't really care for it, you know, Viva, though I used to think I did. So you had better stop here, and--I'll--I'll go.' The pity of the hideous mistake for _him_ came home even to her. 'Where?' she asked. 'You won't go and live in that awful city--you mustn't do that. You're not like them, you know; you'd die of it.' He felt it was true; that he belonged to No-man's-land. 'Perhaps that would be the best solution of the difficulty,' he said gloomily, with a sententiousness which quite took the pathos from the remark. She looked at him gloomily in her turn, with a certain exasperation. 'Oh! if you want to, of course; but, my dear Chris, do you really think I'm worth that sort of thing; from your point of view, I mean?' Something about her as she stood, dainty as ever, reminded him of those days in the boarding-house down the Hammersmith Road, when India, and that part of himself which belonged to India, had seemed so very far off. He took a step nearer to her. 'You might be, Viva, you might be.' She drew back. 'In fifty years' time, perhaps,' she replied shrewdly--for, as she said, she was no fool. 'Why, Chris! can't you see that you have just gone dotty over the new idea of woman as a helpmeet, and companion, and that sort of "biz." And I--why--we girls have left it behind us a bit in England, nowadays. The fatal truth of her remarks invariably silenced Chris, born as he was of a long line of men to whom argument was a religion. 'Well! good-bye, Viva, I will try and not trouble you any more,' he said, accepting defeat with a pang of remorse at his own readiness to do so, at the sense of relief which would not be ignored. She shrugged her shoulders. 'Don't be so tragic, please. And remember I didn't send you away. You want to go visiting your mother in the city, and I'm quite willing you should, provided you take proper precautions; so good-bye, and take care of yourself. There is nothing to worry about. You are up to the ropes there, and I am up to them here, so there is no harm done.' Chris, however, as he packed a portmanteau of necessaries, felt that though this might be true for the present, and though--so far as she was concerned--it might even remain true, it was a different affair for him; there was danger ahead in his future.