t discuss it.
"A great many considerations influence me," he said with a touch of
pompousness.

"Am I one of them?" she persisted. "Because I don't want to be. I'm ready
to share your life, whatever it is."

"Are you?" he asked, with something of the same malicious smile that he
was wont to bestow on Aunt Maria. "Do you think you could share my life?
Do you think you have?"

"I know what you mean," she said, flushing a little. "I daresay I've been
hard and--and didn't take the pains to understand, and was uncharitable
perhaps. Anyhow there'll be no opportunity for any more--any more
misunderstandings of that sort."

"No; the understanding's clear enough now," said he.

She looked at him almost despairingly; he seemed so strangely hostile, so
bitterly sensitive to her judgment of him.

"You think me," he went on, with his persistent eyes unwaveringly set on
her, "a not over-honest mountebank; that's what you and your friends
think me."

"Oh, I wish I'd never tried to talk to you about it!" she cried. "You
take hold of some hasty mood or look of mine and treat it as if it were
everything. You know it isn't."

"It's there, though."

"It never need be, never, never."

"You'll forget it all when we're settled down at--where was it?--Torquay
or somewhere--in our villa, like two old tabby-cats sitting in the sun?
No time to think it all over then? No, only all the hours of every day!"
He paused and then added in a low hard voice, "I'm damned if I'll do it.
I may have to die, but I'll die standing." His eyes gleamed now, and for
the first time they turned from her and roamed over the prospect that lay
below Duty Hill. But they were back on her face soon.

"No, no," she implored. "Not because of me, for heaven's sake, not
because of me!"

"Because of it all. Yes, and because of you too. You don't love me, you
never have." He leant towards her. "But I love you," he said, "yes, as I
loved you when I asked you to be my wife on this hill where we are. Then
don't you understand? I won't go and live that old cat's life with you."
He laid his hand on hers. "Your eyes shall still sparkle for me, your
breath shall still come quick for me, your heart beat for me; or I'll
have no more of it at all."

The touch of rhetoric, so characteristic of him, so unlike anything that
Marchmont or Dick Benyon would have used in such a case, did not
displease her then. And it hit the truth as his penetration was wont to
hit it. That wa