on't suppose you really knew when you said
it, how much you were saving yourself from me. I wouldn't suggest
that credit were due to me for a moment--it isn't. It was just the
same as telling a man to do a brave act, when only the doing of it
could save his life. I did it because I had to. To be a gentleman
is often one chance in a lifetime, and the man who doesn't take it
is not fit for hanging. Birth has nothing to do with it. You offered
me my chance--I took it--that's all. But now you want to deprive me
of my one consolation. You want to refuse that bangle. I refuse to
take it back."

Sally turned and faced him. Her lips were set--her eyes had strange
lights in them. She looked--as she felt--upon the scaffold of
indecision, with the noose of fate about her neck.

"Oh, it is so hard! Why is it so hard?" she whispered.

"Why is what so hard?"

"This--all this."

He laughed ironically. Either he would not see, or he could not see.
Men may not be so dense as they appear. Sometimes it is a subconscious
cunning that aids them in forcing half the initiative into the hands
of the woman.

"Surely, it can't be so difficult a job to just snap the catch of
that bracelet on your wrist, and forget all about whether I ought
to have given it you or not."

"Oh, I don't mean that," she exclaimed, "you must know I don't mean
that."

"Then what?" His whole manner changed. Now she had told him
definitely. Now he knew without a shadow of doubt. She cared. It was
even swaying in her mind whether she could bear to lose him,
notwithstanding all he had said. It did not seem to him that he had
worked her up to it. In that moment, he exonerated himself of all
blame. He had danced gentleman to the clapping of her hands and the
stamping of her foot; and if it came to this, that she cared for him
more than convention, more than any principle, then it was not in
his nature to force a part upon himself and play it, night after night,
to an empty gallery. His hands caught her shoulders, the fingers
gripping with passion to her flesh. "Then what?" he repeated. "Do
you mean you care for me? Do you mean that it's so hard to go--hard
to say good-bye because of that? Is that what you mean?"

She could not answer yet. Even then the rope was not drawn and she
could still faintly feel the scaffold boards beneath her feet.

"If I've made a rotten mistake," he went on, content on the moment
in her silence to misdoubt his own judgment. "If I've g