f its actually bleeding; but she had a fine courge
of her own, and she knew grief over that inexplicable pang must be put
away until the sight of it could not trouble him.

"I'm going to ask you a question," said Jeffrey shortly, in his
distaste for asking it at all. "Do you want me to take father away with
me, you and Anne?"

"Are you going away?" she asked, in an irrepressible tremor.

"Answer me," said Jeffrey.

She was not merely the beautiful child he had thought her. There was
something dauntless in her, something that could endure. He felt for her
a quick passion of comradeship and the worship men have for women who
seem to them entirely beautiful and precious enough to be saved from
disillusion.

"If I took him away with me--and of course it would be made possible,"
he was blundering over this in decency--"possible for you to live in
comfort--wouldn't you and Anne like to have some life of your own? You
haven't had any. Like other girls, I mean."

She threw her own question back to him with a cool and clear decision he
hadn't known the soft, childish creature had it in her to frame.

"Does he want us to go?"

"Good God, no!" said Jeffrey, faced, in the instant, by the hideous
image of ingratitude she conjured up, his own as well as his father's.

"Do you?"

"Lydia," said he, "you don't understand. I told you you couldn't. It's
only that my sentence wasn't over when I left prison. It's got to last,
because I was in prison."

"Oh, no! no!" she cried.

"I've muddled my life from the beginning. I was always told I could do
things other fellows couldn't. Because I was brilliant. Because I knew
when to strike. Because I wasn't afraid. Well, it wasn't so. I muddled
the whole thing. And the consequence is, I've got to keep on being
muddled. It's as if you began a chemical experiment wrong. You might go
on messing with it to infinity. You wouldn't come out anywhere."

"You think it's going to be too hard for us," she said, with a
directness he thought splendid.

"Yes. It would be infernally hard. And what are you going to get out of
it? Go away, Lydia. Live your life, you and Anne, and marry decent men
and let me fight it out."

"I sha'n't marry," said Lydia. "You know that."

He could have groaned at her beautiful wild loyalty. The power of the
universe had thrown them together, and she was letting that one minute
seal her unending devotion. But her staunchness made it easier to talk
to her. She cou