aid to confess it; but why shouldn't they now?"

Susy looked at Strefford, conscious that under his words was the ache of
the disappointment she had caused him; and yet conscious also that that
very ache was not the overwhelming penetrating emotion he perhaps wished
it to be, but a pang on a par with a dozen others; and that even while
he felt it he foresaw the day when he should cease to feel it. And she
thought to herself that this certainty of oblivion must be bitterer than
any certainty of pain.

A silence had fallen between them. He broke it by rising from his
seat, and saying with a shrug: "You'll end by driving me to marry Joan
Senechal."

Susy smiled. "Well, why not? She's lovely."

"Yes; but she'll bore me."

"Poor Streff! So should I--"

"Perhaps. But nothing like as soon--" He grinned sardonically. "There'd
be more margin." He appeared to wait for her to speak. "And what else on
earth are you going to do?" he concluded, as she still remained silent.

"Oh, Streff, I couldn't marry you for a reason like that!" she murmured
at length.

"Then marry me, and find your reason afterward."

Her lips made a movement of denial, and still in silence she held out
her hand for good-bye. He clasped it, and then turned away; but on the
threshold he paused, his screwed-up eyes fixed on her wistfully.

The look moved her, and she added hurriedly: "The only reason I can find
is one for not marrying you. It's because I can't yet feel unmarried
enough."

"Unmarried enough? But I thought Nick was doing his best to make you
feel that."

"Yes. But even when he has--sometimes I think even that won't make any
difference."

He still scrutinized her hesitatingly, with the gravest eyes she had
ever seen in his careless face.

"My dear, that's rather the way I feel about you," he said simply as he
turned to go.

That evening after the children had gone to bed Susy sat up late in the
cheerless sitting-room. She was not thinking of Strefford but of Nick.
He was coming to Paris--perhaps he had already arrived. The idea that he
might be in the same place with her at that very moment, and without her
knowing it, was so strange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of
all her strong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering so
unbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could see him, hear
his voice, even hear him say again such cruel and humiliating words as
he had spoken on that dreadful day in Venic