it isn't one to me?"

"It still remains, for me, an occasion to abase myself--" He broke
off, conscious of a grossness of allusion that seemed, on a closer
approach, the real obstacle to full expression. But the moments were
flying, and for his self-esteem's sake he must find some way of
making her share the burden of his repentance.

"There is only one thinkable pretext for detaining you: it is that I
may still show my sense of what you have done for me."

Madame de Treymes, who had moved toward the door, paused at this and
faced him, resting her thin brown hands on a slender sofa-back.

"How do you propose to show that sense?" she enquired.

Durham coloured still more deeply: he saw that she was determined to
save her pride by making what he had to say of the utmost
difficulty. Well! he would let his expiation take that form,
then--it was as if her slender hands held out to him the fool's cap
he was condemned to press down on his own ears.

"By offering in return--in any form, and to the utmost--any service
you are forgiving enough to ask of me."

She received this with a low sound of laughter that scarcely rose to
her lips. "You are princely. But, my dear sir, does it not occur to
you that I may, meanwhile, have taken my own way of repaying myself
for any service I have been fortunate enough to render you?"

Durham, at the question, or still more, perhaps, at the tone in
which it was put, felt, through his compunction, a vague faint chill
of apprehension. Was she threatening him or only mocking him? Or was
this barbed swiftness of retort only the wounded creature's way of
defending the privacy of her own pain? He looked at her again, and
read his answer in the last conjecture.

"I don't know how you can have repaid yourself for anything so
disinterested--but I am sure, at least, that you have given me no
chance of recognizing, ever so slightly, what you have done."

She shook her head, with the flicker of a smile on her melancholy
lips. "Don't be too sure! You have given me a chance and I have
taken it--taken it to the full. So fully," she continued, keeping
her eyes fixed on his, "that if I were to accept any farther service
you might choose to offer, I should simply be robbing you--robbing
you shamelessly." She paused, and added in an undefinable voice: "I
was entitled, wasn't I, to take something in return for the service
I had the happiness of doing you?"

Durham could not tell whether the irony of h