l, Janey?"

"Yes."

"And will you love me a little if I love him a great deal? Or do you
hate me for loving him?"

"Kitty--you needn't be afraid. The more you love him the more I shall
love you."

"Did--did his wife love him? Oh, ought I to have asked you that?"

Jane shook her head.

"I'm not sure that I ought to tell you."

"She didn't, then?"

"Oh yes, she did, poor little thing. She loved him all she could."

"And it wasn't enough?"

"No, I don't think it was, quite. There was something wanting. But I
don't think Robert ever knew it."

"He knows it now," said Kitty. Her voice lifted with the pride of
passion.

CHAPTER XV

Marston cancelled that appointment at Whitehall. Somebody else's
business would have to wait another day, that was all. He was wont to
settle affairs as they arose, methodically, punctually, in the order of
their importance. At the moment his own affair and Kitty's was of
supreme importance. Until it was settled he could not attend to anybody
else.

He was determined not to let her go. He meant to have her. He did not
yet know precisely how he was to achieve this end, but as a first step
to it he engaged a room indefinitely at the Metropole. There was nothing
like being on the spot. He would consider himself defeated when Lucy had
actually married her. Meanwhile, he was uplifted by his supreme distrust
of the event.

His rival had made a very favourable impression on him, with the
curious effect of heightening Kitty's value in his eyes. Other causes
contributed, her passion for Lucy, and the subtle purification it had
wrought in her (a charm to which Marston was by no means unsusceptible),
the very fact that his own dominion was uncertain and his possession
incomplete.

Up till now he had been unaware of the grip she had on him. He had never
allowed for the possibility of permanence in his relations with her sex.
The idea of marriage was peculiarly unsupportable to him. Even in his
youth he had had no love affairs, avowed and sanctioned. Though Marston
professed the utmost devotion to women like Miss Lucy, the women whom
his mother and his sisters knew, he had noticed a little sadly that he
soon wearied of their society, that he had no power of sustained
communion with the good. The unfallen were for him the unapproachable.
Therefore he had gravitated by taste and temperament to the women of
the underworld. There his incurable fastidiousness drove him to the
pursuit