"You'd marry me, knowing that I didn't love you?"

She turned her eyes to his. The pathos of that touched her. His senses swam when she looked at him.

"Yes," he said thickly. "You might not love me now--you would."

There, he spoilt it all again. She was so certain of its impossibility; he was so confident of his success. With the sentiment of his humility, the unselfishness of his devotion, he might have won her even then. The pity in a woman is often minister to her heart.

But pity left her when he made so sure.

"Oh, it's no good talking like this," she said gently; "I know I shouldn't."

He leant nearer to her, peering into her face. "Well, will you think about it--will you think it over?" He felt certain that when she thought of that home of her own, she would be bound to relent--any woman would. "Let me know some other time."

"If you like. I don't know why you should be so good to me."

Pa.s.sionately he seized her arm with his hand. "Because I love you--don't you see?"

"Yes; I see. I shouldn't think there's much to love in me though."

"Wouldn't you? My G.o.d--I do! Will you give me a kiss?"

One would think he might have known that that was the last thing he should have asked for. One would think he might have realized that pa.s.sion was the last thing he should have shown her at such a moment as that. But he fancied that any woman might want to be kissed under the circ.u.mstances. He had a vague idea that his pa.s.sion might awaken emotion in her; that with the touch of his lips, she might drop her arms about his neck and swoon into submission. He did not know the fiddle string upon which he was playing; he did not know the fine edge upon which all her thoughts were balancing.

She drew quickly away from him; freed her arm and turned towards the house with lips tight pressed together.

"I'm going in," she said.

CHAPTER VIII

But she had promised to think it over. He kept her to that. Again it was the hunter, the quarry, and the inevitable flight. The thought of her possible escape quickened his pulses. He became infinitely more determined to make her his own. The recollection of her saying that she did not love him was humiliating, but it stirred him to deeper feelings of desire. When he thought of her--as at first--readily accepting him and his prospects, he had not formed so high opinion of her as now, being at her mercy.

She stood before his eyes that night as he lay in bed. One vague dream after another filled his sleep, and Sally took part in them all--kissing him, scorning him. His mental vision was obsessed with the sight of her.

With Sally herself, sleep came late--reluctantly--like a tired man, dragging himself to his journey's end.

Janet was seated up in bed, reading and smoking, when she returned.

While she was taking off her clothes, Sally told her all about it--word for word--everything that had pa.s.sed between them. This is a way of women. They have a marvellous memory for the recounting in detail of such incidents as these.

"Thinking it over means nothing," she said when Sally had finished--"thinking it over'll only fix your mind on refusing him all the more. His one chance was this evening. You know that yourself--don't you? You'll never accept him now."

Sally crept wearily into the bed and pulled the clothes about her.

"Will you?" Janet repeated.

Sally muttered a smothered negative into the pillow, and stared out before her at the discoloured wall-paper.

"Sally"--Janet shut up her book, and threw the end of her cigarette with accurate precision into the tiny fireplace--"Sally--"

"What?"

"Is there anybody else? Some man up in Town--some man who comes into the office--some man _in_ the office--is there?"

Sally turned her pillow over. "No," she replied. She kept her eyes away from Janet's, but her answer was firm and decided.

For a few moments, Miss Hallard sat upright in the bed and watched her. Her mind was keyed with intuition. She was conscious of the presence of some influence in Sally's mind--probably more conscious of it than Sally was herself. You could not have shaken her in that belief. Even a woman cannot act to a woman, and that decided "No"

from Sally had only served the more to convince her. When one woman deals in subtleties with another, fine hairs and the splitting of them are merely clumsy operations to perform.

"Are you tired?" asked Janet presently--"or only pretending to be?"

"Why should I pretend? I am tired--frightfully tired."

"You want to go to sleep, then?"

"Well, I don't feel like talking to-night; do you?"

They talked every night, regularly--talked about dresses, about religion, about other people's love affairs, and other women's indiscretions. Sally described hats she had seen on rich women shopping at Knightsbridge; Janet told questionable stories about the lives of models and art students, Sally listening with wondering eyes, needing sometimes to have them explained to her more graphically in order really to understand. So they would continue, in the dark, till one or the other asked a question and, receiving no answer, would turn over on her side, and the next moment be oblivious of everything.

"What's particularly the matter to-night?" persisted Janet. "Sorry you told Mr. Arthur you didn't love him?"

"I don't know."

"I believe you are."

There was no such belief in her mind. She knew it would draw the truth.

She used it.

"No, I'm not," said Sally, decidedly. "I'm not sorry."

"Then what are you so depressed about?"

"Am I depressed?" She sat up again and turned her pillow. "Oh, I haven't said my prayers yet." She began to throw off the bed-clothes.

"Well, you're not going to get out of bed, are you?"

"Yes."

She slid off the bed on to the floor, shuddering as her feet touched the cold linoleum carpet. Habit was strong in her still. She believed in no fixed and certain dogma, but she had never broken the custom of saying her prayers; never even been able to rid herself of the belief that except upon the knees on the hard floor prayers were of little intrinsic value. That she had always been taught; and though the greater lessons--the untangling of the entangled Trinity, the mystery of the bread and wine--had lost their meaning in her mind, ever since her father's predicament, yet she still held fondly to the simple habits of her childhood.

When Janet saw her finally huddled on her knees, her head, with its ma.s.ses of gold hair, buried in the arms flung out appealingly before her, she turned and blew out the candle. Sally never answered questions when she was saying her prayers, though Janet frequently addressed them to her, and took the answers for granted.

There she knelt in the darkness, while Janet dug the accustomed grove in her pillow and went to sleep.

What does a woman pray for--what does any one pray for--whom do they pray to, when the composition of their mental att.i.tude towards the Highest is a plethora of doubts? Yet they pray.

Instinctively at night, by the side of their beds, their knees bent--or there is some genuflexion in their heart which answers just as well--they drop into the att.i.tude of prayer. And they all begin in the same way--O G.o.d-- And not one of them has the faintest notion of whom or what or why that G.o.d is.