e
realization that he could not--in any true sense--live without her.
"Susan," he said, leaning forward, "you must marry me. Do you care for
me at all?"

Her breast rose and fell under the delicate contour of her wool gown.
"The child's mother," she repeated, "you should marry her. How can you
do differently? What can it matter if I care about you?" She raised a
miserable face. "How can I?" she asked.

He could think of no other answer than to repeat his supreme necessity
for her. He struggled to tell her that this was an altogether different
man from Essie Scofield's companion; but his words were unconvincing,
limited by the inhibition of custom. A transparent dusk deepened in the
room accompanied by a pause only broken by the faint explosions of the
soft coal. The power of persuasion, of speech, appeared to have left
him. There must be some convincing thing to say, some last,
all-powerful, argument. It eluded him. The exasperation returned,
spreading through his being.

"Surely," she said laboriously, "there is only one course for you, for
us all."

"I'll never marry Essie Scofield!" he declared bluntly. His voice was
unexpectedly loud, unpleasant; and it surprised him only less than Susan
Brundon. She drew back, and the colour sank from her cheeks; an
increasing fear of him was visible. "In the first place," he continued,
"Essie probably wouldn't hear of it. And if I managed that it would be
only to make a private hell for us both. It would not, it couldn't, last
a month. There is nothing magical in marriage itself, there's no general
salvation in it, nothing to change a man or woman. Why, by heaven,
that's what you have taught me, that is the heart of my wanting you. You
must feel it to understand." He circled the table and laid a hand on the
back of her chair. "Susan."

Her head was bowed, and he could see only her smooth, dark bands of hair
and the whiteness of her neck. "Susan," he said again. "A second wrong
will not cure the first. If one was inexcusable the other would be
fatal. Married--to some one else, with yourself always before me--surely
you must see the impossibility of that. And am I to come to nothing,
eternally fail, because of the past? Isn't there any escape, any hope,
any possibility? You don't realize how very much will go down with me. I
am a man in the middle of life, and haven't the time, the elasticity, of
youth. A few more years to the descent. But, with you, they could be
splendidly