That was the question they asked each other as soon as they were able to collect their ideas and talk calmly. Hallam had put her into Jim Bainbridge's swivel-chair; and he sat on a corner of the writing-table, facing her, holding one of her hands in his. It was become to him now a matter simply of doing what was best for her happiness. Whatever she decided he resolved to abide by. She was the more injured; the settlement of their future must lie in her hands. His rights, his claim on her, which until now had held a paramount place in his thoughts, assumed an insignificance which rendered them negligible beside her supreme right to the direction of her own life. "I'll go, Esme,--I'll go now, if you wish it," he said,--"if it would make things easier for you." He felt her fingers close round his, and said no more about going. They sat hand in hand for a long while without speaking. Presently she moved slightly and lifted her face to his, white and wrung with emotion, with the stain of much weeping disfiguring it; but the sweetness of her look, the pathos in the eyes which met his, made her face seem more beautiful to him than ever before. He leaned over her and pressed his cheek to hers. "Paul," she whispered, "if it wasn't for--It breaks my heart when I think of George." Sharply, as though her words stung him, he drew back. "It's going to hurt him badly," she said. "And my baby... My poor little innocent baby!" Hallam had nothing to say to that. The culminating disaster, the biggest and most appalling of the difficulties with which they were faced, was wrought by the existence of the child. He sat, gripping her hand hard, speechless and immeasurably disconcerted. What was there to say in face of her distress? "I can't think," she said. "I'm all confused. This changes everything. I don't know what to do. I don't feel that I can go home. I haven't got a home..." She reflected awhile. "George will have to be told. That is the part which is going to hurt. I can't bear to think of it." "I'll tell him," Hallam said. "No; not you." She spoke with a sort of repressed vehemence, and drew her hand from his, and sat with it clenched on the desk in front of her, her face working painfully. "Oh! whatever made me do it?" she cried. "Why was I not satisfied to live with my memories? All this distress is of my making. Why did I do it?" "God knows!" he returned with sudden bitterness. "If you had died, your memory would have been sacred to me."