ses--he forgot that he
must be safe, and took her into his arms. He had been so certain of his
stability, after his recoil from Madame Beattie, that he neglected to
resist himself. And Esther did not help him. She clung to him and the
perfume mounted to his brain. What was it? Not, even he knew, a cunning
of the toilet; only the whole warm breath of her.

"Look here," said Reardon, shaken, "what we going to do?"

"You must tell me," she whispered. "How could I tell you?"

Reardon afterward had an idea that he broke into rough beseeching of her
to get free, to take his money, everything he had, and buy her freedom
somehow. Then, he said, in an awkwardness he cursed himself for, they
could begin to talk. And as she withdrew from him at sound of Rhoda
Knox above, he opened the door and ran away from her, to the ordered
seclusion of his own house. Once there he wiped his flustered brow and
cursed a little, and then telephoned her. But Sophy answered that Mrs.
Blake was not well. She had gone to her room.

Reardon had a confused multitude of things to say to her. He wanted to
beg her to understand, to assure her he was thinking of her and not
himself, as indeed he was. But meantime as he rehearsed the arguments he
had at hand, he was going about the room getting things together. His
papers were fairly in order. He could always shake them into perfect
system at an hour's notice. And then muttering to himself that, after
all, he shouldn't use it, he telephoned New York to have a state-room
reservation made for Liverpool. The office was closed, and he knew it
would be, yet it somehow gave him a dull satisfaction to have tried; and
next day he telephoned again.

Within a week Jeff turned his eyes toward a place he had never thought
of, never desired for a moment, and yet now longed for exceedingly. A
master in a night school founded by Miss Amabel had dropped out, and
Jeff went, hot foot, to Amabel and begged to take his place. How could
she refuse him? Yet she did warn him against propaganda.

"Jeff, dear," she said, moving a little from the open fire where he sat
with her, bolt upright, eager, forceful, exactly like a suppliant for a
job he desperately needs, "you won't use it to set the men against
Weedon Moore?"

Jeff looked at her with a perfectly open candour and such a force of
persuasion in his asking eyes that she believed he was bringing his
personal charm to influence her, and shook her head at him
despairingl