nd do you mind such people?" he asked, with an air of surprised
contempt.

"A girl has to be careful what she does."

As Miss Van Tuyn said this she marvelled at her own conventionality.
That she should be driven to such banality, she who had defied the
opinion of both Paris and London!

"Please come once more. I want you to help me."

"I! How can I help you?"

"With Dick Garstin. I do not want to fight with that man. I am not what
he thinks, but I do not wish to quarrel. You can help."

"I don't see how."

"By the fire I will tell you."

"I don't think I ought to come."

"What is life if it is always what ought and what ought not? I do not go
by that. I am not able to think always of that. And do you? Oh, no!"

He cast a peculiar glance at her, full of intense shrewdness. It made
her remember the Cafe Royal on the evening of her meeting with
the Georgians, her pressure put on Dick Garstin to make Arabian's
acquaintance, her lonely walk in the dark when Arabian had followed
her, her first visit to Garstin's studio, her pretended reason for many
subsequent visits there. This man must surely have understood always the
motive which had governed her in what she had done. His glance told her
that. It pierced through her pretences like a weapon and quivered in the
truth of her. He had always understood her. Was he at last going to let
her understand him? His eyes seemed to say, "Why pretend any longer with
me? You wanted to know me. You chose to know me. It is too late now to
play the conventional maiden with me."

It is too late now.

Her will seemed to be dying out of her. She walked on beside him
mechanically. She knew that she was going to do what he wished, that
she was going to his flat again; and when they reached Rose Tree Gardens
without any further protest she got into the lift with him and went up
to his floor. But when he was putting the latchkey into the door the
almost solemn words of Dick Garstin came back to her: "Beryl, believe
it or not, as you can, that _is_ Arabian!" And she hesitated. An intense
disinclination to go into the flat struggled with the intense desire to
yield herself to Arabian's will. Arabian was before her eyes, standing
there by the opening door, and Garstin's portrait was before the eyes of
her mind in all its magnificent depravation. Which showed the real man
and which the unreal? Garstin said that he had painted her intuition
about Arabian, that she knew Arabian's secret