Ivy always appeared so punctually that, on the morning after their return from Croxton, Eric was first surprised and then disquieted when nine o’clock, half-past nine and ten struck and there was still no sign of her. His hand was stretched to the telephone, when she came in breathless and apologetic.

“I couldn’t get here before. Don’t be angry with me, Eric,” she begged, as she took off her gloves and hat.

“I was only getting rather anxious,” he answered. “There’s nothing the matter, is there, Ivy?”

“No. Yes. No... I ran into Johnnie opposite Buckingham Palace, and he insisted on walking across the Park with me. That’s what made me late. We sat and talked. I thought it best to thresh the thing out once and for all and to have done with it.”

The brisk voice and businesslike manner were not wholly convincing; as she smoothed her hair, Eric saw that she was flushed and still out of breath.

“What did he say?,” he asked.

“Oh, he told me he could explain everything, and I’d promised to marry him, and he wanted to marry me, and I’d got to marry him... He was frightfully in earnest. He said I was the only girl he’d ever cared for in the least; and I hadn’t been reasonable, wanting to marry when he hadn’t anything to marry on and then making a quarrel out of it. He vowed that he’d never have looked at that woman or at any other woman, if I hadn’t refused to see him. I did, you know; I wanted to punish him, so I wouldn’t have him near me for a month; it was during that time that I found out... He said that, after all we’d been to each other, I must marry him, I couldn’t marry any one else, I was practically married to him already... I said I couldn’t discuss it with him. But I wish he didn’t take it so seriously... Let’s get to work, Eric; I don’t want to think about it.”

She shivered slightly and took her note-book and pencil from a drawer. Eric turned to his letters without saying anything more. She had grown suddenly pale, and her hands were trembling; obviously unfit for work, she was still less fit for sitting still and brooding... Since Gaymer had clearly contrived this meeting, he meant business; there was nothing more likely than that he would contrive a second and third. Eric stopped in the middle of a letter and looked out of the window, but the street was empty.

“D’you feel you’ve made him see that everything’s over between you?,” he asked.

“I’ve told him so again and again, but he simply pays no attention,” she cried tremulously. “He keeps going back to my promise, as though the only shadow of difference between us was that he was so slow and I was so impatient. He says he’ll marry me as soon as Lord Poynter’s offer is confirmed, and I can publish the engagement as soon as I like. I told him I didn’t want to, I said I wasn’t engaged to him any longer; then we started again at the beginning... Eric, don’t let’s talk about it.”

They returned to the letters, and he went on dictating until he discovered that Ivy was paying no attention to him. One hand supported her head; with the other she was drawing little patterns on the blotting paper. Suddenly the pencil slipped from her fingers; he saw her eyes close and her lips whiten, as she bit them.

“My child—!”

“It’s nothing! I shall be all right in a minute, but I felt so funny all of a sudden.”

“Are you in pain?”

“I am, rather....”

She bit her lips at a new spasm, and Eric put his fingers on her pulse. Then he picked her up and carried her into his room, leaving her there for a moment, while he gave orders for a bed to be made up in his spare room and telephoned for Dr. Gaisford to come round at once.

“I’m really all right, I just felt funny,” she protested, when he told her what he had done. “I think meeting Johnnie, you know... I don’t want a doctor.”

She tried to sit upright, then fell back, covering her face with her hands. Eric took up his stand half-way between the window and the bed until he saw a car stopping at the door. The sight of the doctor’s familiar, burly figure heartened him, and it was only as he ran downstairs and found himself, white-faced and agitated, being mistaken for the patient, that he realized how frightened he had been.

“When you’re not ill yourself, you’ll always take some one else’s illness on your shoulders,” grumbled the doctor. “I’ve never seen such a fellow! Where is she?”

“In my room.”

“And what’s happened?”

As best he could, Eric described Ivy’s sudden collapse. The doctor raised his eyebrows once and grunted to himself:

“Right. Then you can go out for a nice long walk. I shan’t have you in the room and I don’t want you fussing about outside. Come back after lunch, and I’ll give you a new set of orders then. It’s possible that we shan’t be able to move her for some time.”

“But is she bad? You haven’t seen her yet!,” Eric cried inconsequently.

“I can make a guess what the trouble may be. Now clear out, my son, and don’t pull a long face. It’s a thing that may happen to any one—any one who’s fool enough to be a woman, that is. I don’t propose to let her die, if I can help it, so you needn’t summon the relations. The less said to them—and to every one—the better for your young friend.”

He entered the bedroom, leaving Eric mystified and fidgetting with anxiety in the hall. There was a kindly, gruff, “Well, my dear?” and an inarticulate answer from Ivy. Eric hovered on tip-toe outside the door, waiting to be handed prescriptions or sent for brandy. He looked into the spare room to see whether the bed was yet made. “Miss Maitland’s a little faint,” he explained easily enough to the servants. Then he started and turned away, for across the hall and through an open and a closed door came an unmistakable moan. It was not repeated, and he lurked uneasily in the hall, trying to distinguish the mutter of voices. Then he went to his cellar and opened a bottle of brandy. Gaisford was a fool to keep him out of the room; he could not possibly know where anything was kept... Eric hurried into the library and wrote—“In the cupboard under my wash-hand-stand you’ll find sal volatile, eau-de-cologne and aspirin. Also bicarbonate of soda and bismuth. I’ve got brandy here. Let me know if there’s anything else you want.” He twisted the paper into a thin spill, pushed it under the door and knocked gently.

Half-an-hour later Dr. Gaisford came into the library with the paper crumpled in his hand and a smile puckering his eyes and mouth.

“I thought I said something about a nice walk,” he grunted.

“Is it anything serious?,” asked Eric, disregarding the hint.

“‘Bicarbonate of soda and bismuth’,” read the doctor. “How old are you, Eric? Six? Seven? It’s a very ordinary business; and there’ll be no danger, if we are careful; but I somehow don’t think eau-de-cologne quite meets the case, my learned colleague. I’m going to write a note, and you’re going to take it away in a taxi and bring back a nurse. That child’s not to move for three weeks. She won’t want to, for a day or two, because she’s in considerable pain; and, after that, she’ll be very weak. And, after that,—well, you may feel that Providence has stepped in and solved a good many future difficulties for you. It’s a curious thing—”

“Is she in danger?,” Eric interrupted, as the doctor’s meaning became clear to him.

“We-ell, it’s worse than a cut finger and not as bad as a broken back. Perhaps I may be allowed to point out that you do no good to any one by getting into a panic. I’ll tell you that she needs careful handling; and we’ll leave it at that, because that part’s my job. But you’ve to keep your head and lend me your inventive and dramatic genius. We’ve to concoct a convincing lie over this. What are we going to say is the matter with her?”

Eric sat heavily on the arm of a chair, too much numbed to think.

“I leave that to you,” he answered with a helpless shake of the head.

“Then I make it appendicitis. We must study our parts; she must have been troubled with pains and sickness, and I recommended an immediate operation... We’ll make a good lie, while we’re about it; I happen to know that Fitz-William is ill and Greenaway’s fishing in Ireland; they’re the obvious men, so we’ll say we tried to get them to operate; when they couldn’t come, I said we daren’t wait and I’d operate myself. You, meanwhile, tried to telephone to the girl’s mother, but the line was engaged. I think that holds water... I’ll get hold of a nurse I can trust and explain to her... Can you pick any holes in that?”

“Is it all right as regards the law?”

“Yes, unless she’s inconsiderate enough to go and die. I don’t put my name to a false certificate to oblige you or any one, friend Eric; and, if it were anybody else, I wouldn’t touch the whole business with a pole. But, if she pulls through—as she’s going to—, we don’t do any good by telling the truth and we don’t harm any one but ourselves by telling a good, saving lie. Give me a sheet of paper and a pen. And, when you’ve got the nurse, go off to this girl’s mother and pitch her this yarn. She can come and see her for a moment, if she insists, but you can quote all my degrees and decorations to her and say that I’m very strongly against it. Now, d’you think that’s clear?”

He dropped into a chair by the writing-table without waiting for an answer. Eric stood for a moment, trying to remember and understand all that he had been told; then he fetched a hat and stick and returned for the letter.

It was six o’clock before he accomplished his last commission and drove back to Ryder Street. On reaching the Cromwell Road, he was informed that Ivy’s mother was at the house in Norfolk; he hurried to the Law Courts and waited for the judge, who wasted half-an-hour before deciding to do nothing. Then he laid siege to Eaton Place, pursued Lady Maitland round London by telephone and eventually intercepted her between two committees in Westminster. She wasted only twenty minutes in a succession of agitated questions; and by that time Eric had made his story polished and convincing, so that she accepted the doctor’s ban without protest, only insisting that she was to be fed with morning and evening bulletins. The nurse had by this time taken charge; Gaisford had left and returned; Ivy was in as satisfactory a state as could be expected.

“I suppose nothing will induce you to let me see her?,” said Eric.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders and smiled grimly:

“Yes, if you won’t excite her. We’ve carried her into your spare room, away from your infernal telephone contraptions. Don’t try to talk to her.”

Eric went in and returned swiftly, with a scared face.

“I say, she’s in horrible pain,” he exclaimed.

“I know. I sent you in to cure you of any desire to go back. The best thing you can do is to keep out of the way and find some work to do; otherwise you’ll simply fret your nerves to ribbons. It’ll be much worse than this when you’re married, if that’s any consolation. Go and get some dinner and find some one to take to a music-hall.”

Eric knew that the doctor was trying to keep his emotional temperature low, but he winced involuntarily at his inhuman detachment.

“While she’s like that? Thank you, Gaisford,” he answered shortly.

“I’m trying to make a philosopher of you,” the doctor explained.

Eric looked at his watch and walked aimlessly downstairs. He had forgotten to eat any luncheon, and Gaisford’s suggestion of dinner made him conscious of a head-ache and a vague feeling of sickness. He was dawdling irresolutely in the shadowy hall, trying to decide whether it was better to continue hungry or to face conversation at the club, when he heard his name called and looked up to find John Gaymer standing in front of the name-board by the fire-place.

“I was coming to return your call,” he announced.

Eric realized dully that he wanted, above all things, to avoid an altercation. The head-ache told him that; he shuddered at the thought of noise and the effort of reining his temper and barbing his tongue for a wrangle. He had a head-ache, because he was hungry; he was hungry, because he had been about Ivy’s business all day. And Ivy was in such pain that he could not bear to stay in her room. Gaymer—and Gaymer alone—was responsible; he was responsible for her agony of mind and of body; he would be responsible, if she died. It was hardly the moment for him to thrust himself into what, for all Gaisford’s bluff confidence, might at any moment become a house of death; it was hardly the atmosphere or mood in which to force a gratuitous quarrel.

“I’m afraid I’m going out,” said Eric with an effort to avoid copying the veiled bellicose tone of his companion. “I didn’t have any lunch, so I’m dining rather early.”

“Well, don’t let me keep you. Shall I find Ivy upstairs?”

Eric looked thoughtfully at the composed face and powerful frame, wondering why he took the trouble to study him so carefully and realizing with a shock that he was gauging his strength for the moment when they had to fight this out. He wished that he felt less empty and sick. One well-placed blow over the heart from Gaymer’s ready arm would probably kill him.

“She’s upstairs,” he answered. “You can’t see her, though.”

“What a slave-driver you are!,” Gaymer laughed. “I only want to speak to her for a minute.”

“It’s impossible.”

Gaymer raised his eyebrows slightly and felt for his cigarette-case. He looked vainly for a chair and then hoisted himself on to a table beside the fire-place:

“I’ll wait till she comes out.”

“Then you’ll have to wait some time. She’s not coming out to-night—or to-morrow—or the next day.”

“I’m afraid I shall have to go up and see her, then. I quite appreciate that you don’t want me to disturb her work, but you can’t very well sequester her person for days on end.” He got slowly off the table with a swagger of defiance, keeping his eyes on Eric and moving, with his head turned, towards the stair-case. “There’ll be some one to let me in, I suppose?”

“There’s a doctor and a nurse to keep you out,” Eric answered without moving. “Ivy’s very seriously ill, you’ll be interested to hear. She mustn’t be worried, and I can’t allow any noise of any kind... Perhaps you’d better come out with me. There are one or two things which I think you’ve a right to know, because, if that child dies, you’ll have murdered her as surely as I’m standing here.”

Gaymer’s foot was already on the lowest stair, but he first hesitated and then came slowly back.

“You mustn’t allow your love of the dramatic to run away with you,” he sneered. “What’s the matter with her?”

“I’ll tell you outside. Are you coming? I warn you that, if you try to get into my flat, I’ll send for the police.”

He held open the street-door, and Gaymer passed through it jauntily after just enough deliberation to shew that he was not yielding to a threat. Eric walked half a pace ahead of him down St. James’ Street and into the Park. Once Gaymer broke the silence to ask where he was being taken; Eric strode on without answering until he found two empty chairs under a secluded tree.

“I’m glad to have this opportunity of talking to you,” he said. “It must be understood that I can’t let Ivy be molested by you any longer. You made a great nuisance of yourself at Croxton and again this morning—”

Gaymer leaned forward and thrust his face within a foot of Eric’s with an unspoken challenge to strike if he dared.

“And who under the sun are you to tell me what I may do and what I mayn’t, what you’ll let me do?,” he asked. “There are moments, my dear Lane, when you make me impatient. I don’t butt into your private affairs—”

“As I told you once before, Ivy’s a friend of mine,” Eric answered, tipping his chair back.

“And of mine. You were very much concerned to find out whether we were engaged to be married; and, though it’s no more your business now than it was then, I may tell you that we are.”

Eric shook his head slowly:

“She’s been trying to cure you of that delusion for some days. I understand you did once give her a promise, but that was for your own ends. And I understand you’ve offered it again, no doubt again for your own ends. But when a girl’s been seduced and deserted and left with a baby—”

“You damned liar!”

Gaymer jumped up and stood threateningly over Eric.

“It’s no use getting abusive! Perhaps I ought to have said that she was going to have a baby, but that now she won’t. She may die, though; and, in that case, Gaymer, nothing in heaven or earth is going to save you; I shall honour you with my undivided attention. If she pulls through, we shall not require to see or hear anything more of you.”

“You damned liar!,” Gaymer repeated; but his voice had fallen to a whisper, and Eric discovered with nicely blended surprise and rage that the incredulity was unassumed.

“Don’t go on saying that! These things do happen, you know.”

“But this is the first I’ve heard of it!”

“Well... You know now. I saw Ivy for a moment this afternoon, I saw what she was going through... You vile little cad!... And I’ve seen her daily, I’ve seen what she’s had to go through—mentally—for your pleasure and amusement. The first you’ve heard of it, you swine! Of course it is! Ivy has too much pluck and too much pride to come and ask you to marry her out of charity. I shouldn’t be telling you now, if she wasn’t lying at death’s door—Yes, you beast, I’ve seen her—and if I didn’t know it’d kill her to have you blustering in and bullying her... That girl—I met her before you did, and she was as innocent as a child—”

“Hold on a bit!,” Gaymer interrupted.

Eric was out of breath with the vehemence of his attack. He leaned back panting, dizzy with excitement and hunger. Gaymer was still standing over him, but no longer menacing; he rocked a little, and his face was shapeless and flabby. Once, at the onrush of an air-raid, Eric had seen a drunken man lying helpless in the road; with the bursting crash of the first maroons he had become sober, drawing himself slowly upright, while the flush and fire of drink faded out of his cheeks, leaving him tremulous, unmanned but lucid. Gaymer was no less unmanned now.

“I think that’s all I need tell you,” Eric concluded.

“I’m not altogether there yet... I say, d’you feel inclined to come round to my rooms for a drink—?”

“I do not.”

“I wish you would.” The truculence which was second self to Gaymer had left him. “You can call me what you like... Look here, Lane, we’re both of us a bit on edge; you say you’ve had nothing to eat... Come round and take pot-luck with me. It doesn’t commit you to anything; you can go on saying and thinking just whatever you like about me. But I want to hear about Ivy. On my honour, I never suspected... Did you mean what you said about her being at death’s door?”

Eric forced back a passionate answer.

“The doctor says he’s going to pull her through,” he said at length. “I don’t know much about these things. I saw her... We shan’t do any good by discussing it.”

Gaymer leaned down and picked up his cane.

“Won’t you come round?,” he asked again. “I want to hear the whole story. You mayn’t believe it, but I’m very fond of Ivy....”

Before he appreciated that he was yielding, Eric found himself being helped to his feet and led towards Buckingham Gate. Gaymer walked with an uncertain lurch, bumping into him at rhythmic intervals and saying nothing till they were seated on the divan in his smoking-room and he was collecting himself to order dinner. No sooner was his housekeeper out of the room than he poured himself nearly half a tumbler of brandy and drank it in two practised gulps.

“That’s better,” he murmured.

“You’ll find yourself laid out with D. T., if you go on like that,” Eric commented.

“I wonder... I’ve got a head like wood and, ever since I was wounded, I’ve needed the devil of a lot to keep me going... But I can ride or run or shoot or swim with any one you like to put up against me... Well, Lane, it’s not much use my apologizing for anything I may have said, because I’ve never felt particularly friendly towards you from the first day we met, which is some years ago now, and I always very strongly resented your butting in where Ivy was concerned. I enjoyed riling you. But I do at least see that you had better reason for butting in than I thought. I honestly didn’t think... I wonder if you’d mind telling me your version of the business from the beginning.”

Starting sketchily from his first meeting in New York, Eric described his relations with Ivy from the night when he found her walking home alone from the Vaudeville. When he came to their Maidenhead expedition, he paused long in search of a formula.

“She admitted a little; the rest I managed to guess. I said I’d see her through,” he told Gaymer.

There was a second pause, but Gaymer sat swinging the empty tumbler between his knees and staring blankly into the empty fire-place. Eric continued his story to the point where Gaisford came into the library to explain what was the matter with Ivy.

“That’s all,” he concluded.

The housekeeper came in to announce dinner.

“D’you like a wash?,” asked Gaymer. When they were alone, he leaned his head against the mantelpiece, idly kicking the fender with his heel. “You seem to have jumped my claim,” he commented with a note of surprise in his voice.

“Would you say you had much claim to jump?,” asked Eric tartly.

“I think so... Come in to dinner. I’ll give you my version, and you can tell me what you think of it.”

While there was a servant intermittently in the room, Gaymer preferred to talk about his life before the war; and it was not until the end of the meal that he began to speak of Ivy. He was naturally so uncommunicative that Eric had been on nodding terms with him for three years without discovering more about him than that he had been severely wounded in the first months of the war and relegated to light duty ever since; it seemed to Gaymer unlikely that any one should want to know more, and he spoke as though anything that he said might afterwards be used against him. By the end of dinner he had relaxed his hold on unimportant scraps of autobiography, and Eric was able to sketch in a background; Eton and King’s, a father who had died and a mother who had remarried and gone to live in Italy, a sister who had married and drifted out of his life; two years of aimless and mildly dissolute life in London, varied with motor-racing....

“I’d always had rather a turn for mechanics and I used to have a lot of fun taking out cars and motor-bikes for hill-climbing and reliability tests,” said Gaymer, lighting one more in a long succession of cigarettes. He had come into the room smoking and smoked continuously, sending away one dish after another and drinking brandy and water in equal quantities. “You don’t get fat on that sort of thing, though, so I went into a London agency and sold cars on commission to everybody I knew. ’Made a good thing out of it, too. Then I started flying—did you know Babs Neave in the days when we swooped down on Salisbury Plain and broke up the manoeuvres?... I perfected a new aero engine and hoped to make a good thing out of that. Then came the war... I was smashed up a few months before we met; d’you remember, you were dining with that pretentious prig, my aunt Margaret Poynter, at the end of ’15? Barring one trip to America, when I met you again, of course, I’ve been doing office work at the Air Ministry ever since, rather wondering what to do next. My old firm has been making lorries for the War Office these last four years; they won’t have any cars to sell for eighteen months and then they can sell without the help of an agent. I waited till I was quite sure there was nothing for me in the Air Force, then I pulled strings to get out and went to Poynter for a job. He has all kinds of interests, and, if I don’t mind going into exile at Rio, he’ll place me with the Azores Line... Let’s have coffee in the other room; then this old hag can clear away without disturbing us... Lane, this is a delicate position for us. I must tell you again that you seem to have jumped my claim.”

“And I must repeat that you’ve no claim for me to jump. Tell me honestly: did you ever intend to marry Ivy?”

Gaymer poured out the coffee and rang irritably for liqueur glasses. Then he offered Eric a cigar, pierced one for himself and rolled it thoughtfully round and round in his mouth. It was impossible to guess whether he was deciding how much to tell or simply trying to arrange his thoughts. Eric sat down at one end of the divan, wondering why he had come there and what he could add to the few brutal facts which he had thrown at Gaymer in the Park. He would have fainted, if he had gone without food any longer, but, apart from the dinner, he had achieved nothing; there was nothing to achieve. He wondered how Ivy was....

“I—don’t—know,” drawled Gaymer at length, finishing his brandy and throwing himself into a chair. Drink had restored some of his assurance. He was no longer dazed, no longer a suppliant, and, if he had not yet reverted to his old attitude of detached, provocative superiority, he was growing gradually more combative. “You see, when I first met her, marriage was out of the question. Later on, when I said I’d marry her, I was quite ready... if it ever came to that. But I didn’t start out with that intention. I liked her, and she liked me... England’s the only country in the world where people think there’s anything wrong or unusual... And, since the war, girls have altered a good bit; they don’t see why they shouldn’t have a good time. Ivy had a thundering good time, the best she’s ever had in all her life. I got her away from her damned old stick of a father, I took her out and shewed her round; it was all quite innocent and harmless. Then some one began to talk, and she cooled off a bit; people were wondering whether we were engaged, she said. And bit by bit after that she began to put a pistol to my head. She’d evidently made up her mind to marry me; I wasn’t a marrying man, I hadn’t the money, but I told her that when things straightened themselves out... There’s no point in being engaged unless you get some benefit from it... Before she actually came here, I did say as a matter of form that I’d marry her, but at the time I doubted whether either of us would want to. You know how these arrangements end—you have a good time for a month or two; and then the thing begins to pall; and then, if you’re wise, you kiss and say good-bye while you’re still friends—without waiting for the usual dreary scenes and quarrels. After we’d had two or three months of each other I didn’t think she’d talk about marrying me any more; if she had—after three months—, she’d have been different from the others, and perhaps this might be the real thing, perhaps we should both want to go on. In that case I should have to consider ways and means... Even then, you see, I didn’t think anything would come of it. Well, very soon after that she brought the question up again, and we had a bit of a bicker; she went away in a huff, and I waited for her to come to her senses. The next thing was that she came to see me that night—a month later,—and we had an up-and-a-downer. She never said a word then; as I told you, I never suspected till this evening. Well, I went on waiting for her to come to her senses, but, when she cut all communications, I saw I should have to take the first step. I was missing her. Most infernally... So I got myself invited to Croxton and I meant to find out what the trouble was. If she wasn’t the girl I thought she was, if she’d developed a conscience or been talked over or had decided that it wasn’t workable to go on having a good time in the old way, I’d made up my mind to marry her. That was the first time I saw it definitely; she suited me very well, she was a nice girl and very fond of me; it was rather a bore getting married, but I was ready to do it. I tried to talk to her down there, but she told me without any beating about the bush that she’d had enough of me. I should have expected to be a bit put out, but I only admired her for it. I didn’t know she had it in her to hand me out my marching orders quite like that. There wasn’t any opportunity of speaking to her again down there, but I watched out for her this morning and had a word; and, when I met you this evening, I was coming down to have another word... I never bother much about defending myself, but, if I didn’t know till a couple of hours ago, you can’t very well blame me. Now that I do know, I shall do the right thing.”

He poured himself a second glass of liqueur brandy after his unusual effort of sustained articulation and waved the decanter towards Eric.

“There’s nothing for you to do except to keep out of the way,” said Eric. “If Ivy dies,—well, we won’t consider that. If she gets well, she doesn’t want any help or recognition from you; there’ll be no consequences for you to fear; she starts fresh, and you may believe her when she tells you that she never wants to see you again.”

Gaymer shook his head and smiled tolerantly.

“Ah, but I don’t,” he answered.

“She’s told me and she’s told you.”

“I don’t give her up quite as easily as that.”

“I’m not going to let you persecute her.” Eric took out his watch and got up from the divan. Gaymer was becoming truculent again, and they could look for nothing but the dreaded, unprofitable wrangle. “I came here at your request; if there are any questions you like to ask—”

“How soon can I see Ivy?”

“You can’t. She may not live through the night. If she does, I’ll make it my business to keep you away from her.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Of you?”

“Are you afraid to let me see her, afraid that she may make up her mind for herself?”

“She’d done that before you got your marching orders at Croxton.”

Eric turned his back and took a step towards the door, but Gaymer only sank deeper into his chair, with one leg thrown over the other and his finger-tips pressed together.

“You’d better look at facts, Lane. There was a time within the last four months when she belonged to me, soul and body; she may belong to me soul and body again. May... If you try to keep me away—I say ‘try’, because you won’t succeed—, it’s because you’re afraid. You think you’re going to marry her; I’ll assume you do; I’ll assume she’s in love with you, if you’ll admit that she must have been tolerably in love with me not so long ago. As between the two of us, if she’s going to find that she prefers me, would you sooner she found it out before you try to marry her or after you’re happily married?”

“She’s decided already.”

“She’s decided on false evidence. When I tell her that it was only to-night—”

“You won’t have an opportunity of telling her.”

“You haven’t much confidence in yourself.”

“I can’t see why we should either of us submit to being bothered by you any more. If you’ve nothing more to say, I’ll get back to her. I warn you very strongly—don’t make any attempt to see her.”

Gaymer looked at him in silence for a moment and then drew himself slowly out of his chair and walked to the door. Eric picked up his hat and left the flat with a short, murmured “good-night.” As he hurried across St. James’ Park he tried to sort his ideas into order and to escape the oppressive sense of uneasiness which Gaymer’s vague menaces had brought to life again. The fellow could do nothing—one said that again and again, to get the problem in perspective and perhaps to rally one’s courage—; he could not break down doors, Ivy would never consent to speak to him, to read his letters... Yet, if he came and haunted them when they were married....

It was this eternal, insoluble question of the hold that a man retained on the woman whom he had once possessed, the hold of the faithless and the brutal on those whom they betrayed and ill-treated, the hold which women confessed and of which some men boasted. Gaymer had almost said in words that, as Ivy had once fallen to him, in her great first surrender, she would yield again when he demanded it of her... Eric found himself leaning against a tree on the Mall, idly watching the taxis which raced with a jar and rattle towards Buckingham Palace. Here was a sex difference, for women retained no such hold on their men. And he had spent half of his life trying to understand and systematize the psychology of women. If Gaymer fought him for possession of Ivy, it was anybody’s victory.

The doctor was gone by the time that he reached his flat, but the nurse reported that all was well and that her patient was out of danger, almost out of pain. He telephoned reassuringly to Lady Maitland and asked leave to say good-night to Ivy. When he opened the door, her eyes were closed, and he felt a hot wave of anger that he should have submitted to threats from a cad who sat soaking himself with brandy, that he should still be threatened....

Ivy opened her eyes and beckoned to him, with a smile.

“Don’t look so worried, dearest!,” she whispered. “I know I’m being a frightful nuisance to you.”

“Are you better?,” he asked, kissing her hand, which was dry and hot.

“I’m all right—honestly. I only feel rather tired. I won’t be a nuisance to you any more, though.” She turned away with a jerk that set her short hair tossing. “You can get rid of me now, Eric, if you want to.”

“If I want to? I thought I’d lost you to-day, Ivy. It wasn’t a very pleasant feeling.”

“Would you really be sorry...?” She stretched out her hand and caught his wrist. “Eric, be honest with me! You can get rid of me now—Oh, that sounds so horribly ungracious! But you know what I mean. Do you want me, Eric, or were you just sacrificing yourself for me? Tell me honestly. I can bear it.”

She turned her face to him again; and he saw that her eyes were narrowed and her lips tightly shut, as though she were nerving herself to be struck.

“Can I keep you, if I want you?,” he asked.

“You know you can.”

“And is it love—or because you think you ought to? That’s what I’ve been waiting to find out all these weary weeks.”

“You needn’t have waited, my precious darling! I knew that first day at Maidenhead.”