ll; she had got no more than she asked for. The trouble
was, she no longer wanted it. She had been the dupe of her own folly,
by her own romantic bent and the magnetism of the man blinded to the
essentially meretricious spirit clothed in the flesh of his engaging
person.

It had been a simple and perhaps inevitable infatuation of a mind all
too ready to be infatuated, needing heroic treatment--such as she'd
had and blushed to remember--to cure. And the shock of waking
from that mad dream, no less than the shock of physical contact, had
made her frantic and unreasonable. She could but admit that and,
admitting it, be generous enough to let him clear himself.

If only he would not insist on his declaration of love, that she knew
to be untrue, as if the compliment of it must be a balm to a spirit as
bruised as her own!

He went on: "And all this because I seemed to hesitate--because I did
hesitate, knowing I couldn't say all I wanted to. And before I could
explain--"

"You're not married?" she inquired with an absence of emotion that
should have warned him.

"Of course not. But I'm dependent, and good for nothing in a business
way. My income is from my family, and depends on their favour. What
can I say? I love you--I do--on my soul, I do!"

He put his arms once more round her shoulders, and she did not resist
him, but none the less held her head up and back, eying him steadily.

"I love you desperately, but I can't ask you to marry me until I get
the permission of my family. Till then . . . is there any reason . . .?
Be kind to me, be sweet to me, O sweetest of women! I'm mad, mad
about you!"

With no more warning he lowered his head, fastening his lips to
the curve of her throat; and discovered suddenly and definitely his
error. In a twinkling it was a savage animal he held in his arms, and
before he knew what was happening she had broken his grasp and he was
reeling back with a head that rang from the impact of an open hand
upon his ear.

"You shrew!" he chattered. "You infernal little vixen! And I
thought--!"

He sprang toward her, beside himself, with a purpose that failed only
through the intervention of a third party.

A man swinging suddenly round the end of the hedge shouldered between
Lyttleton and the object of his rage--a man whose bulk, in the loose
flannels of a lounge suit, seemed double that of Lyttleton.

"Oh, here!" said Trego impatiently, but without raising his voice.
"Come, come!" He c