Though he seemed to be leading the way, Barbara urged Jack by suggestion up a side-staircase and through a billiard-room to a broad loggia overlooking Greenhill Gardens. There were two chairs and a table with cigarettes and champagne cup; the night air blew chillingly with a scent of spring leaves, and the music reached them as a reverberation mingling with the distant traffic of Piccadilly.

"I say, you won't catch cold, will you?" Jack asked.

Barbara smiled to herself. He would never have thought of the wind or of her, if his match had not been blown out.

"Oh, we shan't be here long enough for that."

Jack lighted the cigarettes and settled himself elaborately in his chair, with one leg thrown over the other.

"I wanted to talk to you. I think you know what it's about."

She had intended to be thrown off her balance with surprise, but the bluntness of his opening did not invite ingenuousness.

"I hope I'm not in disgrace," she answered meekly. "You—rather frighten me, when you're so mysterious. You're not going to say anything unpleasant?"

"I hope you won't find it unpleasant. Look here, the best thing will be for me to say what I've got to say, ... and then you.... I mean, if you interrupt, you'll throw me out of my stride. Barbara, I've told you what I'm earning; and one naturally hopes that it will increase almost automatically year by year. As you know, I'm not a Catholic——"

"Jack——"

He flapped one hand at her with nervous impatience, drew furiously at his cigarette and looked away over the garden and house-tops to the shadowy Park.

"You mustn't put me off my stroke, Barbara.... These are the two big obstacles that all the world will see. Well, I can assure you that I shouldn't be talking to you like this, if you hadn't—in a way—given me the right to.... At first I couldn't stand you at any price whatsoever. Then there was a night when I said to myself that I should have to be careful. It was when you rang me up and invited me to dine with you alone—after that business in Webster's rooms. At first I was perfectly furious; you seemed to be taking that luckless girl's death so calmly and thinking only of the hole you were in. And then—I don't know; something changed. I began to feel sorry for you, I felt extraordinarily fond of you; I told myself that I should have to watch out. Then—something you said—it was when you invited me to one of your own special parties at the Abbey; I got the feeling that you liked me, rather. Was I right?"

The question came so suddenly in the middle of his halting narrative that Barbara started. So far the scene was not developing at all as she had expected. She could interrupt, confuse, stop him; but there was no way of bringing in the open-eyed amazement which she had planned; he seemed to be putting the responsibility on her. And, when he brusquely told her not to interrupt, she felt strangely disposed to obey him.

"Was I right?" he repeated, turning to look at her.

The customary self-satisfied smile had disappeared, and he was frowning. Barbara chose to fancy that he must take on the same expression with a fighting case in court.

"Yes, I quite liked you," she answered. "I always liked you, when you're not trying to shew me that everything I say and do——"

He cut her short with a quick uplift of one finger.

"Good! Well, when you shewed me that, I took stock and began to look at things from another point of view. I suggested to you—as fairly and fully as I could—the chief obstacles; money ... and so forth. If you—or your people, through you—had thought that insuperable, then there was nothing more to be said. I felt I must give you the opportunity of entering a caveat. I need hardly say that, knowing you as I did.... I mean, if you wanted to marry a man, you wouldn't mind if he were a beggar. Would you?"

The new question again startled her by its abruptness. She had a misgiving that he was pressing her into a corner.

"Would you?" he repeated; and she half expected to hear him browbeating her. "It's a simple question.... Yes or no.... I want you to tell the jury.... Remember you are on your oath. Come now ... yes or no...."

"Of course not. But, Jack——"

He stopped her with another jerk, as she had foreseen.

"I knew that. The next thing was—I suppose 'suitability' is the best word. I mean we lead different lives, our outlook's different in some ways. I had to consider what chance of success we should have together. Well, you sometimes say that I find fault with everything you do; I think you see now that I've never said a word that your father hasn't said to you a hundred times. It's what everybody was saying, and I think everybody's glad to see that you've come round to their point of view. We all felt that you were too big, you know...."

He hesitated and looked away, frowning again as he tried to remember the sequence of his argument. Barbara shivered instinctively at his hackneyed, hated phrase, but she was struck silent by the sheer audacity of his patronizing assumptions.

"Jack——" she began, but he again held up his hand.

"I don't know whether I ought to have gone to your father," he resumed. "It seemed rather getting hold of the wrong end of the stick to talk to a woman's father before you've talked to the woman herself. Of course, one naturally goes to him for his assent. I happen to know that your people, like you, saw what was in the wind, and, as they were good enough not to pitch me into the street...."

"Jack! Please!"

Barbara leaned to him with her hands appealingly outstretched. In a little while he would rob her of her last cue. By no abuse of language could such pleading be associated with passion, but he was quoting her against herself until it seemed as if she had almost begged him to marry her.

"I've nearly done," he said, smiling for the first time; then he paused to collect himself for a concise summary, and she could have laughed hysterically at the spectacle of a plodding young barrister trying to argue her into marriage. His voice had never changed in timbre; and, if he had occasionally hesitated over a word, he had never lost the train of thought. His chair was as discreetly remote as when he first sat down, one leg thrown comfortably over the other; and he had not thought fit to use one whisper of endearment.

"I don't want to hear any more!"

"You must."

"But, Jack, you're not in love with me!"

He laughed good-naturedly, as though he were humouring a child.

"I expect I'm the best judge of that. Well, you admit that I'm not wholly repellent to you; the difference in religion can be accommodated; I'm not altogether penniless. I want you to marry me, Babs."

"I can't."

She flung out the words as soon as he gave her a chance of speaking. With his dogged, relentless attack, it was surprising that he left her an opportunity of answering; she would hardly have been astonished if he had taken her firmly by the arm and led her home to announce their engagement.

"That means you don't care for me?"

There was no sign of perturbation; but he was watching her closely. One careless word would enable him to demonstrate that she had coquetted with him for her vanity's sake; his memory was relentless, and she could not pretend to convince herself that she had behaved merely as if she "quite liked" him, when a hundred people were gossiping about them.... And he had a passion for demonstrating things; he seemed to be addressing an invisible jury beyond the pillars of the loggia.

"My dear Jack, how could you ever dream of marrying me—thinking of me, as you do?" she demanded with a breathless attempt to start her speech and to overwhelm his massive arguments with rhetoric and drama.

"Let's stick to facts. I do dream of it. I want to."

"But you disapprove of everything I do, you think I'm vulgar, cheap. Oh, you've said it, Jack; you've used those words. They hurt much too much for me to forget them easily."

"I'm sorry to have hurt you," he interrupted. "But I think you have come round to my way of thinking."

"I'll forget them—I'll try to," she went on, gabbling her speech murderously. "This is much too important for us to think about our own wretched little amour propre; and, when you say I'm "big," I always hope it means that I'm generous, forgiving. But, Jack, you despise me—or you did—the woman that you want to be the mother of your children——"

"You have changed. Otherwise I shouldn't want to marry you."

Barbara walked to the edge of the loggia and stood with her hands on the stone parapet, looking down on to the shadowy foliage of the gardens. She could no longer force into service the speech that she had rehearsed and at any moment she might expect to hear him say—in his horrible jury voice—"Then am I to understand that you never meant anything seriously, that this was all an elaborate trick? Was that your means of vindicating yourself? And do you feel that it has been successful?" He shewed a disconcerting mastery and a no less disconcerting restraint; she was not allowed to interrupt, and, when he had posed a question, he held her to it, waiting silently for an answer and blocking the loop-holes of irrelevancy.

"Why do you say you can't marry me?"

She turned to find that he was still by the table; he had risen as she rose, but without following her, without disturbing his deadly, businesslike composure.

"We should be miserable."

"D'you mean I'm wrong? Don't you care for me?"

"'Care'? I'm thinking about love! You don't know what love is! All the time you've been talking.... So cold and collected.... If you were in love with me, you'd want to take me in your arms, you'd be transfigured, there'd be radiance, glory in your eyes, you'd hold me as if you never meant to let me go!... You—you talked like a leading article; you never even said you loved me."

"I thought we might take that as read."

"But look at you now! If you loved me, you wouldn't want to keep away; you wouldn't be able to."

"I've got a certain amount of self-control."

"To resist something that's not a temptation?"

She came slowly back to him and stood gazing up into his face. As on the night when she had darted from him at the Croxton Ball, her cheeks were white and hollow, her eyes were nearly black; it was the morbid, feverish beauty of a consumptive kept alive by force of will. The spray of orchids rose and fell with her breathing, and he could have caught and encircled her slender, boyish figure with one arm.

"You're looking divine to-night," he murmured.

"Is that all you've got to say?"

"No! I'm responsible for you at this moment. And, if I were you, I should think twice before you blaspheme against the Holy Ghost again. You don't doubt that I love you."

Barbara pressed her hands against her cheeks, throwing her head back and closing her eyes.

"I wish I could," she whispered. "I was trying to, trying to make you doubt it so that you wouldn't mind so much. If I could have made you think that we were just friends.... Jack, you must—before it's too late. You've made a mistake, you're exaggerating everything! Just because you've hardly met a girl before, you think you're in love with me. Because I'm pretty, because I amuse you ... I'll be ever so humble! I'm nothing—nothing but a great friend. If you go away, you'll see it like that; when you come back, we shall still be friends, but you'll wonder how you ever imagined you were in love with me. You're not, Jack! You must tell yourself you're not."

"I don't understand, Barbara."

"I'm trying to help you. I can never marry you; and I want you to see that you're not losing anything. You don't really want me. Oh, you don't, Jack!"

"Why do you say you can never marry me? Don't you love me?"

Barbara had expected the question for so long that it had lost half its force before reaching her. Her mind moved quickly, as it had done all the evening, and she could anticipate Jack's slow change of expression, his dawning realization and then her punishment. There was no give-and-take, when he lectured or attacked; no neatness of phrase, no delicacy of sarcasm or irony, no intellectual joy of battle. He dealt the bludgeon blows of one who seemed to boast that he was not clever but tried to be honest. She felt suddenly frightened for her pride and for herself; and she knew that he would beat her as conscientiously as he had tried to win her.

"Love isn't everything," she answered.

"I'm waiting to be told what the obstacle is."

In another moment he would have summarized for the third time all possible objections to the marriage and his own complacent disposal of them. She could not bear that again.

"Jack, you're not a Catholic," she cried.

"I know. I told you that from the first. But we can arrange that; I'll do whatever is necessary. It's a nuisance, because I expect your people loathe the idea of your marrying a heretic as much as mine loathe the idea of my marrying a Catholic. Fortunately, we can ignore them."

"I could never marry a man who wasn't a Catholic."

She clutched wildly at the promise of escape, and Jack betrayed emotion for the first time in a gape of astonishment.

"But your own church—if you still call yourself a Catholic—doesn't go as far as that."

"I don't care. It should. It's lying to your soul, if you believe one thing and let children believe something else that you know to be false. There's no sympathy of spirit when each thinks the other wrong and sneers privately.... I can't talk about this, but you see now why I tried to stop you.... Jack, do take me home! I feel as if I couldn't stand any more!"

She turned convulsively and hurried back to the parapet of the loggia. Jack picked up a cigarette, which he regarded absently, frowning again.

"You could never marry a man who wasn't a Catholic?" he repeated.

"No. Jack, don't let's talk about this any more! If I'm to blame for making you unhappy.... Oh, try to forgive me! If you let me think I'd spoiled your life—— Please take me home."

He roused himself from contemplation of the gilt name and address on the cigarette and walked with her into the house.

"Is your car coming back for you?" he asked with a detachment that she admired.

"Yes. You can take it on, if you like. Or perhaps you'd rather not come with me.... I suppose you won't be coming to the Abbey to-morrow?"

"I intended to."

"Jack, it can't do any good!"

"Do you withdraw the invitation?"

"I'd rather you didn't come. Later on we may be able to meet.... You won't believe me now, but time is a wonderful healer——"

He interrupted her with a laugh of grating boisterousness.

"Is there anything to heal?"

It was after four o'clock when Barbara returned home alone from Ross House; but, though she went quietly to bed, Lady Crawleigh interrupted her undressing. The Duchess of Ross was the latest busybody to wonder audibly whether young Waring was serious, and it was high time for the girl to know that people were talking about her.

"There was such a mob that, when Jack and I had got away from it, we didn't go back," sighed Barbara wearily, to explain her lateness. "I wish Eleanor Ross didn't know quite so many people. Oh, mother, Jack can't come to the Abbey this week-end. He's writing to you, but he asked me to give you that message."

Lady Crawleigh picked up a pendant, head-band and bracelet of fire-opals from their scattered hiding-places on the floor, trying not to seem either too much surprised or too indifferent. Then she knelt, with a cracking of knee-joints, to search for the missing half of a pair of ear-rings. Barbara, she reflected, had evidently done one thing—or perhaps the other—or even neither; mercifully she could not do both.

"He's really no business to chop and change like that at the last moment," she complained. "What's happened?"

"He's kept in London," Barbara answered. "Don't bother to look for those things, mother; Merton will be so disappointed, if there's nothing for her to tidy. She always waits till I'm fast asleep, really tired, and then throws tepid tea at me with one hand and knocks over all the furniture with the other.... I can hardly keep my eyes open. You'll let me go to sleep, won't you?"

Lady Crawleigh scrambled to her feet and came to the side of the bed, an undignified, shrunken figure in a blue peignoir and satin slippers, with grey-black hair secured in thick short plaits.

"My child, is anything the matter?"

Barbara was lying with one bare arm over her eyes, as though the light hurt her. She had not waited to brush her hair, and the room was littered with furiously scattered clothes.

"I'm only tired," she said. "I've never known anything so hot as that place."

"Well, go to sleep." Lady Crawleigh shewed no sign of leaving the bedside. "On the whole perhaps it's just as well that he isn't coming to the Abbey. Some one was saying to-night——"

"Mother, I'm not going to marry Jack!"

Lady Crawleigh's eyes opened with innocent surprise.

"My darling, who ever said anything about it?"

Barbara laughed hardly.

"You were going to, weren't you? I thought I'd save time. Jack.... I've had a—remarkable evening, but I don't think I want to talk about it."

Lady Crawleigh changed the lights, but she continued to hover between the bed and the door, picking up a glove here and a stocking there, glancing stealthily at Barbara and flogging her imagination to guess what had taken place. The girl was a little exacting with men, and there might have been a quarrel; but it was rather drastic for Jack to default from the Abbey at the last moment. He had possibly received an unexpected rebuff; but then the rebuff was unexpected by every one, for Barbara had shewn him all the encouragement that a woman could give. Possibly she had encouraged him too much and received a rebuff herself....

"Darling——"

"I'm so tired, mother."

She seemed without resistance or power to assert herself, as though she had been bullied and beaten. Lady Crawleigh felt a need to protect her, as she had not felt it for ten years; Barbara was usually stoical with bodily pains, and a wound to her pride or an ache at her heart was shared with no one.

"Yes, darling, I won't keep you awake, but has there been any unpleasantness? I mean, I have to think about the future—about inviting him here."

"Oh, there's no reason why you shouldn't invite him. He can please himself whether he comes or not."

Lady Crawleigh hesitated a moment longer, then tip-toed to the door and turned off the lights. Nothing was to be learned from Barbara at present.

No elucidation came from the letter of apology which she received from Jack next day. He was unexpectedly detained in London, but hoped that he might be forgiven and invited again some time later in the summer. It was a question of private business, which would keep him very fully occupied for some weeks. He would have given longer warning, if possible, but the business had only come to him in the middle of the night, as it were.... Lady Crawleigh tore up the letter impatiently, then pieced it together and read it with perplexed attention. If there had been no quarrel, no rebuff, no unpleasantness, he would not underline this private business and hint that he did not want to be invited to the house for the present; if there had been a quarrel, it was incomprehensible that he should ask to be given another chance later in the summer.

But for the phrase, "I've had a remarkable evening, but I don't think I want to talk about it," Barbara might simply be tired. Certainly, she was in excellent spirits next day, and the whole party at the Abbey revolved round her and shone with her radiance. On their return to London she threw herself as insatiably as ever into all that was going on. The only difference now was that she never danced with Jack, because he had disappeared; and she never mentioned his name. Others also remarked his disappearance, and, though the excuse of private business was bravely presented, they at least were not satisfied. Lady Crawleigh suggested inviting him to a musical party, from which it might have been noticeable to exclude him; Barbara raised no objection, but Jack replied from his chambers that he was unfortunately compelled to refuse all invitations at present.

It was mysterious and annoying, for an absurd amount of gossip was swirling and eddying among the weary, chilled women who sat night after night round ball-room walls. Deganway professed to have seen an impertinent paragraph in the column of The Sphinx headed "Riddles for Our Readers"; and, for every one who enquired what had happened to Jack, Lady Crawleigh knew that a dozen must be asking themselves why Barbara had made so public an exhibition of herself, if she did not mean to let anything come of it. And there was an added mystery and vexation when Jim Loring said: "I've the best reason for knowing there's nothing to worry about," in a tone which shewed that he was himself deeply worried.

He met his aunt on the morrow of a confession which lasted from ten o'clock until two next morning. Jack had invited himself to dinner at Loring House, stipulated that no one else should be present and pledged his host to secrecy.

"I can't quite trust my own judgement," he drawled, when they were alone after dinner. "A new factor, you know.... I haven't quite adjusted myself to it.... I don't suppose it's any news to you that I want to marry your cousin Barbara? Well, I've every reason to think she would marry me to-morrow but for the unfortunate circumstance that she's a Catholic and I'm not."

Loring involuntarily winced and looked away, recalling his own shipwreck on a similar rock, the months of dull agony and the empty years of wandering, which had but lately come to an end. It was the first time that they had met alone, and Jim was more than three years older; new lines were visible at the corners of his eyes, his face and body were heavier and more inelastic. A note of bitterness broke over-often through the habitual irony of his voice, as though his spirit were still raw under its dressing of tolerant boredom.

"If any one knows anything on that subject," he murmured, "you've come to the right man. Have you—actually put it to her?"

"Oh, yes. We're hung up on that. Barbara says that she could never marry a man who wasn't a Catholic."

"But that's absurd! The Church itself——"

"So I told her, but she goes one better than her Church. Jim, I feel that there's the makings of a first-class tragedy, if we're not very careful ... and very clever. I want to marry her more than anything in the world. There's nothing—I think there's literally nothing I wouldn't do to bring it off. She—well, we went into it pretty thoroughly the other night. I could see she was torn in two.... I—didn't press it. I knew that, if she felt as strongly as that—in her bones—, I shouldn't sweep her off her feet, however much she seemed to be convinced at the moment. It didn't look like being permanent. I had to find some other way out."

He paused and relit his cigar. The door was ajar, and Loring got up to close it; then, instead of going back to his chair, he took a turn up and down the library, with his chin on his chest and his hands thrust deep into his pockets. Three years ago he had come back to that room from his last farewell with Sonia Dainton; he has distractedly summoned George Oakleigh to advise him and had paced up and down, up and down, flinging half-smoked cigarettes into the fire-place. And Oakleigh, whom he had invoked for help, would only tell him brutally that love was over and that he must set his teeth and face it.... Now again no other advice was possible.

"I'm dam' sorry, Jack," he muttered.

His voice quavered in sympathy, because their tragedies had so much in common. He had never lost his heart to any one but Sonia, as Jack had lost his only to Babs Neave; they had been immune for the first thirty years of their life, and they were paying for their self-denial and their affronting indifference to woman. Jack probably enjoyed exposing his soul as little as he had done with George.

"It's rather a mess, isn't it?" said Jack.

"What are you going to do? Look here, we're old enough friends for me to talk freely to you. It hurts like hell at the time, but one does get over it. As you know, I went abroad for some years and tried to forget. I should be—embarrassed, if I sat next to Sonia at dinner to-night, but I shouldn't get the same tug at the heart that I got when I just saw her for a moment in the distance—at the Coronation. You'd better go away."

Jack smiled and then turned his head, finally resting his chin on one fist and staring at the empty fire-place so that his face should be hidden.

"I'm not going away," he answered. "I've every intention of marrying Barbara. I feel that we were made for each other."

"But what are you going to do?" Loring repeated, as he paused again.

"I propose to become a Catholic."

Loring started and sat down on the arm of a chair without speaking. Jack's natural stolidity was a guarantee against melodrama.

"You can't do that, Jack," he said at length.

"We know several people who have."

"I won't criticize them, because they may already have been Catholics in everything but name. They're entitled to the benefit of the doubt. But you and I have talked religion a hundred times. It wouldn't be straight dealing."

"Then I'm glad I've not talked religion with any one else. There'll be no one else to give me away. I'm entitled to the benefit of the doubt."

"No one would believe you; Barbara certainly wouldn't; and you'd never be able to impose on yourself. You'd always feel dishonoured, Jack."

There was a long silence, in which Loring was visibly the more embarrassed. Jack smoked his cigar tranquilly, looking ahead of him at the fire-place and not striving to pose either as hero or as cynic.

"My dear Jim," he answered at length, "if this were an easy question, where I could trust my own judgement, I wouldn't inflict my troubles on you like this. I won't pretend I like it. If you could suggest a better way.... Now, when once the thing's done, there's no discussion; I don't question Barbara's bona fides and I won't let her question mine. Any children will be full-blooded Catholics, and the question will never be raised again. I've completed a formality; she will in fact marry a Catholic, which is what she's sticking out for, and I'll see to it that no shadow of difference ever arises from religion. It's not easy, God knows. Incidentally, the entire world will say I'm marrying her for her money and getting converted so that she shan't forfeit it. Always a pleasant thing to hear.... However, necessity knows no law."

"That's tied round the neck of every crime and immorality in the world's history."

Jack looked up with the first sign of interest that his face had shewn.

"You really think that would be a crime? I've come to you for your opinion. A crime against Barbara?"

"Against yourself. I don't think it would affect her. Do you know anything about the course of preparation before you're received into the Church? You'll have to tell one lie after another, weeks and weeks of them. And, when you've been received, you'll have to continue. D'you propose to go regularly to Mass? Will you go to Confession?"

Barbara's reputation for laxity was widely known and disapproved.

"I'll do whatever my wife does," Jack promised.

Though he pretended to keep an open mind, he was inviting criticism only for the satisfaction of demolishing it. Loring was still shocked and doubly shocked that he could make no impression on his friend's stubborn insensibility.

"Have you discussed it with your people?" he asked.

"I've discussed it with no one. It'll be hell for them, of course."

"They won't be taken in."

Jack smiled a little ruefully and took up his position in front of the fire-place, facing his friend.

"They won't be taken in," he agreed. "They'll hate it. I hate it. It's a lie, a chain of lies. I don't expect that I shall ever be able to invent excuses or tell myself a fairy-tale to get round it. The best I can say is that it's the only means and that the end must justify the means. I can't defend myself, Jim."

It was difficult to reason with a man who admitted every charge in advance, and Loring was puzzled to know why they were arguing at all.

"You're committing a crime against yourself—and making your family perfectly miserable," he pointed out. "I know people rob and murder, when they're in love, but why come and tell me about it?"

"I wanted you as a barometer—for my own sanity. Have I lost touch with reality?"

"I think you're quite mad. I've been through it myself; and I was just as mad. The best advice I can give you is to go away from Babs for three or six months and see how you feel. If it's as bad as ever at the end.... No, I'm damned if I take the responsibility of encouraging you; I feel as badly about it as that."

Both started guiltily as the butler came in with a tray of decanters and glasses, and Jack murmured, "Jove! It's getting late." When they were alone again, he took a second cigar and flung himself into an arm-chair.

"We might make a present of this to Eric Lane," he said grimly, "for one of his plays. I've never before been up against a thing where there was so little chance of compromise. Or, if I have, I've always said, "There's only one possible thing to do," and I've tried to do it. D'you remember Raney's cheerful prophecy my last night in Oxford? Within ten years we should all have made such fools of ourselves that we should wish we were dead. Nine years ago. Your undergraduate is a sexless creature; we none of us thought then that a mere woman could mess up our lives.... Well, I've had a run for my money."

"There's only one possible thing to do here," said Loring emphatically, holding him back as he tried to change the subject.

"You weren't such a sea-green incorruptible three years ago."

"When I made a fool of myself.... There's no comparison. I was prepared to flout the Church and marry without dispensation; it wouldn't have been a valid marriage in the eyes of the Church, and the whole of Catholic society would have cut me. But I never offered Sonia to change one faith for another or to pretend that I had."

Jack sprang violently out of his chair and strode to Loring's sofa, standing over him with legs apart and arms akimbo.

"But if she'd insisted? You've got to be honest about this."

Loring looked up at the unwontedly white face and burning eyes above him; then he looked away, whistled to himself and shrugged his shoulders.

"I'd have done it," he answered.

"Well, that's how I feel now."

"And if Babs were married already?"

Jack turned away with a mirthless laugh.

"Damn you, Jim!" he cried.

"Not a bit of it! You would stop short of some things."

"But then I should be injuring another man."

"He might rejoice to be rid of her. And here you're injuring yourself."

There was a long silence, and Loring tried to ease it by filling two tumblers with brandy and soda. Jack returned to his chair, drawing furiously at his cigar and rapidly smoothing the back of his head.

"I'm not going to give her up," he said at length.

"You can at least go away and think it over. Don't meet her. Work as you've never worked before. Mark you, the best thing is to go right away. She won't help you a bit. Women are cruel and women are selfish. If she's made up her mind that she can't marry you, she'll do the next best thing for herself and take good care that she gets all the time, attention, affection that she can out of you. And your nerves will crack. If you live within telephoning or writing distance, you're done for. I saw that for myself. When I got back to England a few months ago, I only consented to stay in London when I heard that Sonia had gone abroad. She'd have tried to get on some kind of terms with me. If I'd still been smashed up, she'd have wanted to have a look at her handiwork; if I'd completely recovered, she'd want to see whether she still had the power to cast a spell over me. And, if she felt she'd done me a great wrong, she'd have wanted to vindicate herself. Women drown bad consciences in self-justification. Will you go away?"

"I'll think about it. Jim, did you know that Babs took her religion so seriously?"

"No, but then I don't know her at all well."

"I'm taking all she says at face-value, allowing for a little natural rhetoric——"

"Well, I shouldn't—with any woman," Loring interrupted. "Look here, Jack. You and Babs have got yourselves into a tangle. You can get out of it by refusing to see her again—which you won't entertain; or by perjuring yourself—which I hope and pray you won't do; or by her climbing down a bit. One of you has to make the sacrifice; and I'm inclined to think Solomon would have said that, if she's not prepared to climb down—you're not asking her to do anything that the Church forbids—she's not in earnest, she's not worth having. Solomon would have said that, if she put you in the second place, she didn't want you.... I wonder whether she does. For all I know she's just made up her mind to add your scalp to her belt. Why the deuce did she let you propose to her—you did actually, didn't you?—if she meant to bring up this objection at the last minute?"

"It was only when I began to trot out the objections that she recognized them. Jim, this is a question of instinct; whether a woman's really in love with you or whether she's only pretending may be felt, but no one can prove it. I take it—though I've had no experience—that there's always a moment when a woman surrenders, not only in words but with all her being. If you'd ever broken in a horse, you'd know what I mean. It's like that with her."

Loring raised his eyebrows in passing surprise at the comparison no less than at Jack's assurance.

"Well, I'm glad to hear it," he said without conviction. "If you're right, she'll climb down. If she won't climb down, it means she doesn't want you."

Jack pondered for a while without answering; then he looked at his watch and jumped up with a murmur of dismay.

"Jim, d'you know it's just on two?"

"I wonder what time it was when I'd finished pouring out my troubles to George that night! I hope it's going to be all right, Jack, though a mixed marriage is a hideous gamble. And Babs is a fair gamble in herself. And I wish I felt as certain of her as you do. Mind, three months——"

"I don't commit myself to any specific period," Jack interrupted, as they went into the hall. Barbara had the obstinate vanity of a spoilt and wilful child; after refusing to yield on one point, she was capable of sacrificing even her own happiness to sustain her refusal.

"If she holds out for three months," said Loring gravely, "it'll mean that there's something in her life bigger than you."

Jack laughed and ran down the steps into Curzon Street. That she wanted him was never in doubt since her first advances at the Croxton ball.

"Good-night, Jim, and many thanks. You'll hear from me before I die."

"Best of luck, old man," Loring called back, with such heartiness as he could force into his voice.