sucked into the whirlpool,' and he laughed with a nod towards Drake.

She turned to him with her eyes shining. 'And you are proud of it.'

Fielding smiled indulgently. 'That's a woman's thought.'

'But you don't deny it's truth.'

Clarice said nothing more until the meeting had terminated and the
party was in the street. They walked from the Town Hall to Drake's
hotel, Clarice and Fielding a few paces behind the rest. The first
words which she spoke showed to him that her thoughts had not altered
their drift. 'Yes, you have changed,' she said, and implied
unmistakably, 'for the better.'

'You only mean,' laughed Fielding, 'that I have given up provoking you.'

'No, no,' she said. 'Besides, you evidently haven't given that up.'

'Then in what way?'

'I shall offend you.'

'I can hardly think so.'

'Well, you were becoming a kind of--'

'Say it.'

'Paul Pry.'

To a gentleman whose ambition it had been to combine the hermit's
indifference to social obligations with an indulgence in social
festivities, the blow was a cruel one; and the more cruel because he
realised that Clarice's criticism contained a grain of truth. He hit back
cruelly. 'Drake tells me he thinks of taking a place here. I suppose he
means to marry.'

'I believe he does,' replied Clarice promptly. 'Mrs. Willoughby.'

Fielding stopped and apostrophised the stars. 'That is perfectly untrue,'
he said. He walked on again as soon as he perceived that he had stopped,
adding, with a grumble, 'I pity the woman who marries Drake.'

'Why?' asked Clarice in a tone of complete surprise, as though the idea
was incomprehensible to her, and she repeated insistently, 'Why?'

'Well,' he said, inventing a reason, 'I think he would never stand in
actual need of her.' Clarice drew a sharp breath--a sigh of longing, it
seemed to her companion, as for something desirable beyond all blessings.
He continued in the tone of argument, 'And she would come to know that.
Surely she would feel it.'

'Yes, but feel proud of it perhaps,' replied Clarice, 'proud of him just
for that reason. All her woman's tricks she would know useless to move
him. Nothing she could do would make him swerve. Oh yes, she would feel
proud--proud of him and proud of herself because he stooped to choose
her.' She corrected the ardency of her voice of a sudden; it dropped
towards indifference. 'At all events I can imagine that possible.'

They were within fifty yards of the hotel, and walk