re gentlemanly to marry me on false pretences?"

"Well, perhaps not, but a form of ungentlemanliness less repulsive to
me--Oh, just to me personally. I don't know whether you quite understand
yet why I gave up Blent to you. Just the same feeling has made me do
this--with the addition, of course, that I'm more in love with you now."

"I don't believe it, or you'd have trusted me--trusted my love for you."

"I've trusted it enormously--trusted it to forgive me this deceit."

"If you had come and told me----"

"At the very best you'd have taken months."

"And you couldn't wait for me?"

"Well, waiting's a thing I detest."

"Oh, I've made up my mind," she declared. "I shall go back to town
to-night."

"No, no, that's not it." Harry did not want the arrangement
misunderstood. "If we can't agree, I go back to town--not you. I kept my
fly."

"You needn't make fun of it anyhow."

"I'm not. I'm quite serious. You stay here, I go away. I accept this
post abroad--the Arbitration business. I've got to send an answer about
it to-morrow."

"No, I shall go. I'm resolved upon it. I won't stay here."

"Then we must shut the place up, or pull it down," said Harry. "It will
look absurd, but--Well, we never consider the neighbors." For the first
time he seemed vexed. "I did count on your staying here," he explained.

"I can never forgive you for deceiving me."

"You said you wouldn't let your pride stand between us."

"It's not my pride. It's--it's the revelation of what you are, and what
you'll stoop to do, to gain----!"

"What have I gained yet?" he asked. "Only what you choose to give me
now!"

She looked at him for a moment. The little scene in the corridor
upstairs came back to her. So that was the meaning of it!

"I've taken your freedom from you. That's true. In return I've given you
Blent. I did the best I could."

"Oh, do you really delude yourself like that? What you did was utter
selfishness."

Harry sighed. They were not getting on prosperously.

"Very well," he said. "We'll agree on that. There's been a revelation of
what I am. I don't--I distinctly don't justify myself. It was a lie, a
fraud."

"Yes," said Cecily, in a low but emphatic assent.

"I gained your consent by a trick, when you ought to have been free to
give or refuse it. I admit it all."

"And it has brought us to this!" She rose as she spoke, a picture of
indignation. "There's no use talking any more about it," said she.

He look