a kiss; yet before
he could stop her she was gone. Her footsteps died away in the passage,
but Swithin sat gazing intently at a single bright drop of spilt wine
quivering on the table's edge. In that moment she, in her helplessness
and emotion, was all in all to him--his life nothing; all the real
things--his conventions, convictions, training, and himself--all seemed
remote, behind a mist of passion and strange chivalry. Carefully with
a bit of bread he soaked up the bright drop; and suddenly he thought:
'This is tremendous!' For a long time he stood there in the window,
close to the dark pine-trees.

XI

In the early morning he awoke, full of the discomfort of this strange
place and the medley of his dreams. Lying, with his nose peeping over
the quilt, he was visited by a horrible suspicion. When he could bear it
no longer, he started up in bed. What if it were all a plot to get him
to marry her? The thought was treacherous, and inspired in him a faint
disgust. Still, she might be ignorant of it! But was she so innocent?
What innocent girl would have come to his room like that? What innocent
girl? Her father, who pretended to be caring only for his country? It
was not probable that any man was such a fool; it was all part of the
game-a scheming rascal! Kasteliz, too--his threats! They intended him
to marry her! And the horrid idea was strengthened by his reverence for
marriage. It was the proper, the respectable condition; he was genuinely
afraid of this other sort of liaison--it was somehow too primitive! And
yet the thought of that marriage made his blood run cold. Considering
that she had already yielded, it would be all the more monstrous! With
the cold, fatal clearness of the morning light he now for the first time
saw his position in its full bearings. And, like a fish pulled out of
water, he gasped at what was disclosed. Sullen resentment against this
attempt to force him settled deep into his soul.

He seated himself on the bed, holding his head in his hands, solemnly
thinking out what such marriage meant. In the first place it meant
ridicule, in the next place ridicule, in the last place ridicule. She
would eat chicken bones with her fingers--those fingers his lips still
burned to kiss. She would dance wildly with other men. She would talk of
her "dear Father-town," and all the time her eyes would look beyond him,
some where or other into some d--d place he knew nothing of. He sprang
up and paced the