do seemed foul when he
looked on her honourably held little head and her straight blue smock,
he began to tamper with reality, so that he might believe himself not to
have incurred the guilt of that intention. Surely it had been she that
had planned that thing, not he? Girls were nasty-minded and were always
thinking about men. He began to remember the evening all over again,
dusting with lasciviousness each of the gestures that had shone with
such clear colours in his sight, dulling each of the sentences by which
she had displayed to him her trimly-kept mental accoutrement until they
became simpering babble, falsifying his minute memory of the scene until
it became a record of her lust instead of his. Something deep in him
stated quietly and glumly that he was now doing a wrong far worse than
the thing that he had planned, and, though he would not listen, it was
making him so sensible that the essence of the evening was his
degradation that he felt very ill. If the palpitation of his heart and
the shortness of his breath continued he would have to sit down and then
she would be kind to him. He would never forgive her for all this
trouble she had brought on him.

When she could no longer hold it in she exclaimed artlessly, "Yon Mr.
Yaverland's a most interesting man."

He searched for an insult and felt resentful of the required effort, for
his heart was making him very uncomfortable. He wished some crude
gesture, some single ugly word, would do it. "You thought him an
interesting man?" he asked naggingly. "You don't surprise me. It was a
bit too plain you thought so. I'll thank you not to be so forward with a
client again. It'll give the office a bad name. And chatting at the door
like that!"

He looked for his umbrella, which was kept in this room and not in the
hall-stand, lest its handsome cairngorm knob should tempt any of the
needier visitors to the office, and removed its silk cover, which he
placed in the pocket where he kept postage-stamps and, to provide for
emergencies, a book of court plaster.

"I'm sure I'll not have to speak twice about this, Miss Melville," he
said, with an appearance of forbearing kindliness, as he passed out of
the door. "Good night."

IV

She paused in the dark archway that led into Hume Park Square.

"It can't hurt me, what Mr. Philip said, because it isn't true." She
wagged a pedagogic finger at herself. "See here! Think of it in terms of
Euclid. If you do a faulty proof