you any more. I'll go away
altogether--abroad again."

"No--after a week--"

"Much better not."

"Yes. Come here after a week. And if we can't be alone I'll give you a
letter somehow ... Please, Martin--you must."

"Maggie, just think--"

"No--after a week."

"Very well, then," he turned on her fiercely. "I've been honest. I've
told you. I've done all I can. If I love you now it isn't my fault."

He left the room, not looking at her again. And she stood there,
staring in front of her.

CHAPTER VI

THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN HOME

Martin walked into the street with a confused sense of triumph and
defeat, that confusion that comes to all sensitive men at the moment
when they are stepping, against their will, from one set of conditions
into another. He had gone into that house, only half an hour ago,
determined to leave Maggie for ever--for his good and hers. He came
back into the street realising that he was now, perhaps for the first
time, quite definitely involved in some relation with her--good, bad,
safe, dangerous he did not know--but involved. He had intended to tell
her nothing of his marriage--and he had told her. He had intended to
treat their whole meeting as something light, passing,
inconsiderable--he had instead treated it as something of the utmost
gravity. He had intended, above all, to prove to himself that he could
do what he wished--he had found that he had no power.

And so, as he stepped through the dim gold-dust of the evening light he
was stirred with an immense sense of having stepped, definitely at
last, across the threshold of new adventure and enterprise. All kinds
of problems were awaiting solution--his relation to his father, his
mother, his sister, his home, his past, his future, his sins and his
weaknesses--and he had meant to solve them all, as he had often solved
them in the past, by simply cutting adrift. But now, instead of that,
he had decided to stay and face it all out, he had confessed at last
that secret that he had hidden from all the world, and he had submitted
to the will of a girl whom he scarcely knew and was not even sure that
he liked.

He stopped at that for a moment and, standing in a little pool of
purple light under the benignant friendliness of a golden moon new
risen and solitary, he considered it. No, he did not know whether he
liked her--it was interest rather that drew him, her strangeness, her
strength and loneliness, young and solitary like the