marry her," he said definitely, at last.

"What could I do?" She twisted her sapphire ring. "Ask somebody else."

"Don't expect me to believe there is nothing you could do. Go to her as
my friend. It isn't such a monstrous thing to ask. Tell her any good you
know of me. At present her imagination paints me in all the lurid
colours of the lost."

The face she turned upon him was all little sharp white angles, and the
cloud of fair hair above her temples stood out stiffly, suggesting
Celine and the curling tongs. She did not lose her elegance; the poise
of her chin and shoulders was quite perfect, but he thought she looked
too amusedly at his difficulty. Her negative, too, was more
unsympathetic than he had any reason to expect.

"No," she said; "it must be somebody else. Don't ask me. I should become
involved--I might do harm." She had surmounted her emotion; she was able
to look at the matter with surprising clearness and decision. "I should
do harm," she repeated.

"You don't count with her effect on you."

"You can't possibly imagine her effect on me. I'm not a man."

"But won't you take anything--about her--from me? You know I'm really
not a fool--not even very impressionable."

"Oh, no!" she said impatiently, "no--of course not."

"Pray, why?"

"There are other things to reckon with." She looked coldly beyond him
out of the window. "A man's intelligence when he is in love--how far can
one count on it?"

There was nothing but silence for that or perhaps the murmured "Oh, I
don't agree," with which Lindsay met it. He rode down her logic with a
simple appeal. "Then after all," he said, "you're not my friend."

It goaded her into something like an impertinence. "After you have
married her," she said, "you'll see."

"You will be hers then," he declared.

"I will be yours." Her eyes leaped along the prospect and rested on a
brass-studded Tartar shield at the other end of the room.

"And I thought you broad in these views," Lindsay said, glancing at her
curiously. Her opportunity for defense was curtailed by a heavy step in
the hall, and the lifted portiere disclosed Surgeon-Major Livingstone,
looking warm. He, whose other name was the soul of hospitality, made a
profound and feeling remonstrance against Lindsay's going before tiffin,
though Alicia, doing something to a bowl of nasturtiums, did not hear
it. Not that her added protest would have detained Lindsay, who took his
perturbations away with him as