He groaned. “I’m in a devil of a fix, Clementina.” “Indeed?” What could he be in a fix about? Anything more aggravatingly, insolently, excruciatingly happy than the pair of young idiots whom she had accompanied in the thirty-five million dove-power car aforesaid, she had never beheld in her life. Sometimes it was as much as she could do to restrain herself from stopping the car and dumping the pair of them down by the wayside and telling them to go and play Daphnis and Chloe by themselves in the sylvan solitudes of France, instead of conducting their antic gambols over her heartstrings. The air re-echoed deafeningly with cooings, and the sky grew sickly with smiles. What could a young man in love want more? “It’s the biggest, awfullest mess that ever a fellow got into,” said Tommy. “Well, I suppose it’s your own fault,” she remarked, with just a touch of the vindictive. She had emptied her heart of heaven and thrown it at the boy’s feet, and he had not so much as said “thank you.” “I’m not so sure,” said Tommy. “That’s just like a man,” said Clementina. “Every one of you is ready enough to cry _peccavi_, but it’s invariably somebody else’s _maxima culpa_.” “I didn’t cry _peccavi_ at all,” said Tommy. “I suppose I had better do so, though,” he added, after a gloomy pause. “I’ve been a cad. I’ve been abusing your hospitality. Any man of honour would kick me all over the place. But I swear to you it was not my fault. How the deuce could I help it?” “Help what, my good Tommy?” Tommy dug his stick fiercely in the gravel. “Help falling in love with Etta. There! now it’s out. Of course you had no idea of it.” “Of course not,” said Clementina; with a wry twist of her mouth, not knowing whether to shriek with insane laughter or with pain at the final cut of the whip with which she had flagellated the offending Eve. But her grim sense of humour prevailed, though her strength allowed it to manifest itself only in the twinkling of her keen eyes. “I don’t know what you can think of me,” said Tommy. She made no reply, reflecting on the success of her comedy. As she had planned, so had it fallen out. She had saved her own self-respect—more, her self-honour—and she had saved him from making muddy disaster of his own life. The simplicity of the boy touched her deeply. The dear, ostrich reasoning of youth! Of course she had no idea of it! She looked at him, sitting there, as a man sometimes looks at a very pure woman—with a pitying reverence in her eyes. But Tommy did not see the look, contemplating as he was the blackness of his turpitude. For each of them it was a wholesome moment. “You see, not only was I your guest, but I held a kind of position of trust,” continued Tommy. “She was, as it were, in my charge. If I had millions, I oughtn’t to have fallen in love with her. As I’m absolutely penniless, it’s a crime.”