ch a relation. For it was, or had been,
a relation, wasn't it, hadn't it? That was just the absurd part of it.
When she got up to go I said to her that it was more a relation than
ever, but that I hadn't the face after what had occurred to propose
to her for the present another opportunity. It was plain that the only
valid opportunity would be my accomplished marriage. Of course she would
be at my wedding? It was even to be hoped that _he_ would.

"If _I_ am, he won't be!" she declared with a laugh. I admitted there
might be something in that. The thing was therefore to get us safely
married first. "That won't help us. Nothing will help us!" she said
as she kissed me farewell. "I shall never, never see him!" It was with
those words she left me.

I could bear her disappointment as I've called it; but when a couple of
hours later I received him at dinner I found that I couldn't bear his.
The way my manoeuvre might have affected him had not been particularly
present to me; but the result of it was the first word of reproach that
had ever yet dropped from him. I say "reproach" because that expression
is scarcely too strong for the terms in which he conveyed to me his
surprise that under the extraordinary circumstances I should not have
found some means not to deprive him of such an occasion. I might really
have managed either not to be obliged to go out or to let their
meeting take place all the same. They would probably have got on in
my drawing-room without me. At this I quite broke down--I confessed my
iniquity and the miserable reason of it. I had not put her off and I had
not gone out; she had been there and after waiting for him an hour had
departed in the belief that he had been absent by his own fault.

"She must think me a precious brute!" he exclaimed. "Did she say of
me--what she had a right to say?"

"I assure you she said nothing that showed the least feeling. She looked
at your photograph, she even turned round the back of it, on which
your address happens to be inscribed. Yet it provoked her to no
demonstration. She doesn't care so much as all that."

"Then why are you afraid of her?"

"It was not of her I was afraid. It was of you."

"Did you think I would fall in love with her? You never alluded to
such a possibility before," he went on as I remained silent. "Admirable
person as you pronounced her, that wasn't the light in which you showed
her to me."

"Do you mean that if it _had_ been you would h