some hope for herself.

"Perhaps," she said brokenly, "if you couldn't get her you might take
me." As she looked up at him pleadingly, with real tears standing on
her long eyelashes and the flush of a genuine emotion on her cheeks,
Flint was conscious that she was very, very pretty.

Her prettiness would not at any time have held any temptation for him.
The inherited austerity of his blood and a fastidiousness of
temperament beyond the appeal of this chromo beauty would have
prevented it in any case, but just now he was under the spell of an
exaltation which lifted him above even the possibility of such danger.
He had stood on the Mount of Transfiguration and looked into the eyes
of spiritual love. Its light still shone above and around him, and
shed its influence over the whole world. All dark thoughts, all
basilar instincts shrank back abashed before that white light. The old
monogamous instinct of the Anglo-Saxon race, which has kept it sound
at the core in spite of a thousand vices, held this man as true to the
woman whom he wished to marry as if she were indeed his wife.

Tempted he was not, but most wofully disturbed in mind he certainly
was. Having destroyed the dubious address, he felt himself to have
assumed in a measure a responsibility for this foolish girl's future,
her immediate future at least. His mind traversed rapidly all the
possible courses open to him. He must take her somewhere. Hotels and
boarding-houses were alike impossible. He thought of Nora Costello;
but he could not bring himself to ask her to share the narrow limits
of her one room with this be-furbelowed young person, and then it
would involve so many awkward explanations. There was only one person
who would understand. By a process of exclusion, his thoughts were
driven more and more insistently toward seeking aid from Winifred
Anstice.

He felt to the full the delicacy and difficulty, not to say the
absurdity, of his position, in seeking to place the woman who loved
him under the protection of the woman he loved, but it was the only
course which seemed even possible.

"Come," he said suddenly to Tilly, with an authority which the girl's
will was powerless to resist. "Since you will not go home, you must be
cared for here. I will take you to a friend of mine, and you must do
as she tells you."

"And what if I won't go?" said the girl, with a feeble effort at
self-assertion.

"Then I will leave you here. Only never hold me responsi