e."

"But you will be kind?"

He felt her lips kissing his hand. And the soft moist touch sent a queer
feeling through him, protective, yet just a little brutal, having in it a
shiver of sensuality. He withdrew his hand. And as if warned that she
had been too pressing, she recoiled humbly. But suddenly she turned, and
stood absolutely rigid; then almost inaudibly whispered: "Listen!
Someone out--out there!" And darting past him she turned out the light.

Almost at once came a knock on the door. He could feel--actually feel
the terror of this girl beside him in the dark. And he, too, felt
terror. Who could it be? No one came but Larry, she had said. Who else
then could it be? Again came the knock, louder! He felt the breath of
her whisper on his cheek: "If it is Larry! I must open." He shrank back
against the wall; heard her open the door and say faintly: "Yes. Please!
Who?"

Light painted a thin moving line on the wall opposite, and a voice which
Keith recognised answered:

"All right, miss. Your outer door's open here. You ought to keep it
shut after dark."

God! That policeman! And it had been his own doing, not shutting the
outer door behind him when he came in. He heard her say timidly in her
foreign voice: "Thank you, sir!" the policeman's retreating steps, the
outer door being shut, and felt her close to him again. That something in
her youth and strange prettiness which had touched and kept him gentle,
no longer blunted the edge of his exasperation, now that he could not see
her. They were all the same, these women; could not speak the truth!
And he said brusquely:

"You told me they didn't know you!"

Her voice answered like a sigh:

"I did not think they did, sir. It is so long I was not out in the town,
not since I had Larry."

The repulsion which all the time seethed deep in Keith welled up at those
words. His brother--son of his mother, a gentleman--the property of this
girl, bound to her, body and soul, by this unspeakable event! But she
had turned up the light. Had she some intuition that darkness was
against her? Yes, she was pretty with that soft face, colourless save
for its lips and dark eyes, with that face somehow so touchingly, so
unaccountably good, and like a child's.

"I am going now," he said. "Remember! He mustn't come here; you mustn't
go to him. I shall see him to-morrow. If you are as fond of him as you
say--take care, take care!"

She sighed out,