. He hates your having anything
to do with me. He's told you so. I'm sure of it."

"Jimmy would never dare to do that."

"Anyhow, you know he does."

She did not deny it.

"Remember this," Dion said, looking straight at her, "I'm not going to
be sacrificed a second time on account of a child."

After a long pause, during which Mrs. Clarke sat without moving, her
lovely head leaning against a cushion which was fastened near the top of
the back of the chair, she said:

"What do you mean exactly by being sacrificed, Dion?"

Her manner had changed. The hostility had gone out of it. Her husky
voice sounded gentle almost, and she looked at him earnestly.

"I mean just this: my life with the woman I once cared for was smashed
to pieces by a child, my own dead child. I'm not going to allow my
life with you to be smashed to pieces by Jimmy. Isn't a man more than a
child? Can't he feel more than a child feels, give more than a child can
give? Isn't a thing full grown as valuable, as worth having as a thing
that's immature?"

He spoke with almost passionate resentment.

"D'you mean to tell me that a man's love always means less to a woman
than a child's love means?"

Silently, while he spoke, she compared the passion she had had for Dion
Leith with the love she would always have for Jimmy. The one was dead;
the other could not die. That was the difference between such things.

"The two are so different that it is useless to compare them," she
replied. "Surely you could not be jealous of a child."

"I could be jealous of anything that threatened me in my life with you.
It's all I've got now, and I won't have it interfered with."

"But neither must you attempt to interfere with my life with my child,"
she said, very calmly.

"You dragged me into your life with Jimmy. You have always used Jimmy as
a means. It began long ago in London when you were at Claridge's."

"There is no need--"

"There is need to make you see clearly why I have every right to take a
stand now against--against----"

"Against what?"

"I feel you're changing. I don't trust you. You are not to be trusted.
Since Jimmy has been here again I feel that you are different."

"I am obliged to be specially careful now the boy is beginning to grow
up. He notices things now he wouldn't have noticed a year or two ago.
And it will get worse from year to year. That isn't my fault."

His sunken eyes looked fixedly at her from the midst of the network o