"I think you are very sweet," he said gently, "and beautifully natural. I probably startled you. The unexpected is often disconcerting. If you had been one of the temperamentally even people of whom we have been talking you wouldn't have been startled; but then, in that case, neither should I have been offering knightly service after the manner of a hero of romance. As a sign that I am forgiven, will you sing this evening the song you delighted us with on the night I first met you?" "What was that?" Pamela asked, still too confused to meet his eyes. "Mon coeur s'ouvre a ta voix." "Oh! Saint-Saens... Yes, of course I will." When Dare returned next door, which he did earlier than Mrs Carruthers expected, he amazed her with the abrupt announcement of his intended departure on the morrow. "You were right," he said, "and I was wrong. I obey your marching orders. And now naturally," he added, smiling at her grimly, "you'll enjoy the feminine satisfaction in a moral victory--which is a euphony for getting your own way." She approached him with a glad look on her face, which had in it a good deal of admiration, and held out her hand as a man might do. "I knew it," she cried triumphantly. "Boy, you're straight." He made a wry face as he shook hands with her. Then suddenly he stooped and kissed her. "It's the least you can offer me," he said in explanation. She laughed, well satisfied. She had not been mistaken; he had vindicated her belief in him. CHAPTER ELEVEN. Dare, as he sat at the Arnotts' dinner-table that evening, making the extra man, the odd number, as he had done on a former occasion, was conscious of two discrepant facts; namely, that he had not decided a moment too soon to quit the danger zone of Pamela's seductive influence, and that he was sincerely sorry he was leaving on the morrow. The regret was, perhaps, the keener sensation of the two; it balanced his sense of moral satisfaction to a nicety. The dinner was the funeral feast of his only real love affair. He intended, when he parted from Pamela that night, never to see her again. "I was a fool to come," he told himself. "No one can handle fire and expect to escape unhurt. And I knew it was fire I was playing with." Yet he would gladly have continued to act foolishly. The strongest inducement towards wisdom was the fear that Pamela herself might get singed; fire which spreads ends in a conflagration.