ingly held out his hand to his hostess. He seemed to
have no alternative but to make his adieux. Jane walked with him
towards the door.

"I am horribly disappointed," he confessed, under his breath.

She smiled a little deprecatingly.

"I couldn't help having people here, could I?"

"I suppose not," he answered, with masculine unreasonableness. "I only
know that I wanted to see you alone."

"Men are such schoolboys," she murmured tolerantly. "Even you! I must
see my friends, mustn't I, when they know that I am here and call?"

"About that friend on Thursday night?" he went on.

"I am waiting to hear from him," she answered, "whether he prefers to
dine here or to take me out."

His ill-humour vanished, and with it some of his stiffness of bearing.
His farewell bow from the door to Lady Somerham was distinguished with a
new affability.

"If we may be alone," he said softly, "I should like to come here."

Nevertheless, his visit left him a little disturbed, perhaps a little
irritable. With all the dominant selfishness which is part of a man's
love, he had spent every waking leisure moment since their last meeting
in a world peopled by Jane and himself alone, a world in which any other
would have been an intruder. His eagerly anticipated visit to her had
brought him sharply up against the commonplace facts of their day-by-day
existence. He began to realise that she was without the liberty
accorded to his sex, or to such women as Nora Miall, whose emancipation
was complete. Jane's way through life was guarded by a hundred
irritating conventions. He began to doubt even whether she realised the
full import of what had happened between them. There was nothing gross
about his love, not even a speculation in his mind as to its ultimate
conclusion. He was immersed in a wave of sentimentality. He wanted her
by his side, free from any restraint. He wanted the joy of her
presence, more of those soft, almost reluctant kisses, the mute
obedience of her nature to the sweet and natural impulse of her love.
Of the inevitable end of these things he never thought. He was like a
schoolboy in love for the first time. His desires led him no further
than the mystic joy of her presence, the sweet, passionless content of
propinquity. For the time the rest lay somewhere in a world of golden
promise. The sole right that he burned to claim was the right to have
her continually by his side in the moments when he was freed from his
work, a