said. "I shan't
make the same mistake twice in one day."

He evidently knew what she meant, although I did not. His heavy eyebrows
twitched, and then, with a half-contemptuous shrug of his shoulders he
strode out of the room with an air of leaving us to the doom we so justly
deserved.

"The worst of it is that the second mistake doesn't cancel the first,"
Anne remarked thoughtfully.

XI

THE STORY

She still stood by the great oak table, her hands resting lightly on its
dark polished surface. I could see the vague reflection of her fingers
reaching up through the deep solidity of the oak to join hands with her.
She produced, I thought, an impressive effect of fragility and power in
her contrast with that massive table. The material of her flesh was so
delicate compared to the inert, formidable mass before her. She could not
have lifted or moved it by her own effort. And yet it seemed that she had
absolute command over that ponderous obstacle, that in some way the
mobility of her spirit must give her control of it, that she might, if she
wished, plunge those relatively fragile hands of hers deep into the lake
of that dark and adamant surface.

She had not looked at me since Jervaise left the room, and when she spoke
again she gazed with a kind of concentrated abstraction out of the window
at the quiet glory of the calm August evening. Nevertheless her speech
showed that all her attention was being given to the human interests that
had just been absorbing us.

"Are you really a friend of ours?" she asked, "or did you just come here
faute de mieux?" The little French phrase came like an unexpected jewel,
as if she had relapsed unconsciously into a more familiar language.

I was strangely confused by the fact of our being alone together. I had an
entirely unwarranted feeling that we were about to make up a quarrel. And
I wanted to do my utmost to produce the best possible impression upon her.

"I hope I may call myself your brother's friend," I began lamely. "All my
sympathies are with him."

"You don't know the Jervaises particularly well?" she inquired. For one
moment she glanced down at her poised hands, but almost instantly returned
to her rather absent-minded gazing through the open window.

"Except for Frank and his brother, I never met one of them until last
night," I explained. "I was at school and Cambridge with Frank."

"But they are your sort, your class," she said. "Don't you agree with th