u make love to me just now?"

It seemed to me that the least I could do was to answer "Because I love
you." But the words must have choked me, and with shame, I told her
the truth.

"I made love to you," I said, "because I have only one life to live."

"I thought so," she said, still very quietly, and turned toward the
house. But I had caught up with her in a mere crumb of time.

"I have been honest with you, Evelyn," I said; "will you be honest with
me? I have told you why I made love to you. I want to know; it seems
to me that I _ought_ to know. Why did you let me?"

"Oh," she said, "I shut my eyes and pretended that we were in the
conservatory, seven years ago tonight."

"Pretended?"

"Yes, Archie, honestly."

Halfway up the steps of the house she turned, and said a little
wearily, "How many lives do you think _I_ have to live?"

"May it be long and happy."

On that we parted, and I heard the ghost of a cynical laugh as she let
herself into the house.

And I hurried home, inexcusably late for dinner, and filled with shame
and remorse. And ever at the back of my head was the image, not of
Evelyn Gray, vague and illusive in the starlight, but of that other
image that had stood forth dark and sharply defined against the light
of the hall.

"Lucy Fulton," I said to myself, "you came in the nick of time. And
you are my good angel."

VIII

On the following day I had no especial desire to see Evelyn. I thought
that it might be embarrassing for her, and I knew that it would be
embarrassing for me, so that it was not without trepidation that I
presented myself at the Fultons' house to keep a riding engagement with
Lucy.

But you never know what will embarrass a woman and what won't. I
remember when the Jocelyn house burned down, and nothing was saved but
a piano (at which Peter Reddy seated himself and played the "Fire
Music") and a scuttle of coal, how Mrs. Jocelyn, usually the shyest and
most easily shocked person in the world, came down a ladder in nothing
but a flimsy nightgown, and stood among us utterly unselfconscious and
calmly making the best of things, until someone (it was a warm night
and there were no overcoats in the crowd) tore down a veranda awning
and wrapped her in it. And I remember a certain very rich and pushing
Mrs. Edison from somewhere in New Jersey who worked herself almost into
the top circle of society, and was then caught in a very serious and
offensive lie, whi