e in on my own terms, this time, not yours."

"Oh, of course."

"I mean I can't come in on the same terms as before. All that was over
nine years ago, when you married. You and I are older. We have had
experience. We've suffered horribly. We know."

"What do we know?"

She let go his hands.

"At least we know the limits--the lines we must draw. Fifteen years ago
we didn't know anything, either of us. We were innocents. You were an
innocent when you left me, when you married."

"When I married?"

"Yes, when you married. You were a blessed innocent, or you couldn't have
done it. You married a good woman."

"I know."

"So do I. Well, I've given one or two men a pretty bad time, but you may
write it on my tombstone that I never hurt another woman."

"Of course you haven't."

"And I'm not going to hurt your wife, remember."

"I'm stupid, I don't think I understand."

"Can't you understand that I'm not going to make trouble between you and
her?"

"Me? And her?"

"You and her. You've come back to me as my friend. We'll be better
friends if you understand that, whatever I let you do, dear, I'm not
going to let you make love to me."

She drew herself back and faced him with her resolution.

She knew the man with whom she had to deal. His soul must be off its
guard before she could have any power over his body. In presenting
herself as unattainable she would make herself desired. She would bring
him back.

She knew what fires he had passed through on his way to her. She saw that
she could not bring him back by playing poor, tender Maggie's part. She
could not move him by appearing as the woman she once was, by falling at
his feet as she had once fallen. This time, it was he who must fall at
hers.

Anne Majendie had held her empire, and had made herself for ever
desirable, by six years of systematic torturings and deceptions and
denials, by all the infidelities of the saint in love with her own
sanctity. The woman who was to bring him back now would have to borrow
for a moment a little of Anne Majendie's spiritual splendour. She saw by
his flaming face that she had suggested the thing she had forbidden.

"You think," said she, "there isn't any danger? I don't say there is. But
if there was, you'd never see it. You'd never think of it. You'd be up to
your neck in it before you knew where you were."

He moved impatiently. "At any rate I know where I am now."

"And I," said she, in response to his moveme