ssed together, her brows a little knit.

"I won't," she said slowly. "I am going on like this. I and you are
going to be lovers--just as we are lovers now--secret lovers. And I am
going to help you in all your projects, hold your party together--for
you will have a party--my house shall be its centre----"

"But Justin----"

"He takes no interest in politics. He will do what pleases me."

I took some time before I answered. "You don't understand how men feel,"
I said.

She waited for what else I had to say. I lay prone, and gathered
together and shaped and reshaped a little heap of pine needles. "You
see---- I can't do it. I want you."

She gripped a handful of my hair, and tugged hard between each word.
"Haven't you got me?" she asked between her teeth. "What more _could_
you have?"

"I want you openly."

She folded her arms beneath her. "_No_," she said.

For a little while neither of us spoke.

"It's the trouble of the deceit?" she asked.

"It's--the deceit."

"We can stop all that," she said.

I looked up at her face enquiringly.

"By having no more to hide," she said, with her eyes full of tears. "If
it's nothing to you----"

"It's everything to me," I said. "It's overwhelming me. Oh Mary, heart
of my life, my dear, come out of this! Come with me, come and be my
wife, make a clean thing of it! Let me take you away, and then let me
marry you. I know it's asking you--to come to a sort of poverty----"

But Mary's blue eyes were alight with anger. "Isn't it a clean thing
_now_, Stephen?" she was crying. "Do you mean that you and I aren't
clean now? Will you never understand?"

"Oh clean," I answered, "clean as Eve in the garden. But can we keep
clean? Won't the shadow of our falsehoods darken at all? Come out of it
while we are still clean. Come with me. Justin will divorce you. We can
stay abroad and marry and come back."

Mary was kneeling up now with her hands upon her knees.

"Come back to what?" she cried. "Parliament?--after that? You _boy!_ you
sentimentalist! you--you duffer! Do you think I'd let you do it for your
own sake even? Do you think I want you--spoilt? We should come back to
mope outside of things, we should come back to fret our lives out. I
won't do it, Stephen, I won't do it. End _this_ if you like, break our
hearts and throw them away and go on without them, but to turn all our
lives into a scandal, to give ourselves over to the mean and the
malicious, a prey to old women--