s displayed in a touching way by his care to
procure some woman to attend on Flora. The condition of guaranteed
perfect respectability gave him moments of anxious thought. When he
remembered suddenly his steward's wife he must have exclaimed _eureka_
with particular exultation. One does not like to call Anthony an ass.
But really to put any woman within scenting distance of such a secret
and suppose that she would not track it out! No woman, however simple,
could be as ingenuous as that. I don't know how Flora de Barral
qualified him in her thoughts when he told her of having done this
amongst other things intended to make her comfortable. I should think
that, for all _her_ simplicity, she must have been appalled. He stood
before her on the appointed day outwardly calmer than she had ever seen
him before. And this very calmness, that scrupulous attitude which he
felt bound in honour to assume then and for ever, unless she would
condescend to make a sign at some future time, added to the heaviness of
her heart innocent of the most pardonable guile.

The night before she had slept better than she had done for the past ten
nights. Both youth and weariness will assert themselves in the end
against the tyranny of nerve-racking stress. She had slept but she woke
up with her eyes full of tears. There were no traces of them when she
met him in the shabby little parlour downstairs. She had swallowed them
up. She was not going to let him see. She felt bound in honour to
accept the situation for ever and ever unless--Ah, unless ... She
dissembled all her sentiments but it was not duplicity on her part. All
she wanted was to get at the truth; to see what would come of it.

She beat him at his own honourable game and the thoroughness of her
serenity disconcerted Anthony a bit. It was he who stammered when it
came to talking. The suppressed fierceness of his character carried him
on after the first word or two masterfully enough. But it was as if
they both had taken a bite of the same bitter fruit. He was thinking
with mournful regret not unmixed with surprise: "That fellow Fyne has
been telling me the truth. She does not care for me a bit." It
humiliated him and also increased his compassion for the girl who in
this darkness of life, buffeted and despairing, had fallen into the grip
of his stronger will, abandoning herself to his arms as on a night of
shipwreck. Flora on her side with partial insight (for wome