"One lump or two?" asked Elizabeth, holding the sugar-tongs poised over his cup of tea.

"One, please," said Humphrey.

"Milk or cream?"

"Milk."

She handed him the cup in silence. There was something in the frank, questioning look in her blue eyes that made him avert his gaze. Their meeting had not been at all as he had imagined it. He did not spring towards her, boyishly, and take her in his arms and kiss her. He had approached her humbly and timidly when she stood before him, in all her white purity and beauty, and their lips had met in a brief kiss of greeting. Her manner had been curiously formal and restrained, empty of all outward display of emotion.

And now they sat at tea in her room with the conversation lagging between them. As he looked round at the room with its chintzes and rose-bowls, its old restfulness reasserted itself. But to Humphrey it seemed now more than restful—it seemed stagnant and out of the world.... Somewhere, in Paris, there were music and laughter, but here, in this quiet backwater of London, one's vision became narrow, and life seemed a monotonous repetition of days. He felt moody, depressed; a sense of coming disaster hung over his mind, like a shadow. Her quick sympathy perceived his gloom.

"You ought not to have gone," she said, softly.

"You mean to the funeral?"

"Yes; you are too susceptible ... too easily influenced[323] by surroundings. There was no need to come all this way to make yourself miserable."

"I don't know why I went," he said. "We never had much in common, my aunt and I, but somehow ... I don't know ... I couldn't bear the thought of not being present at her funeral. I had a silly sort of idea that she would know if I were not there."

"You are too susceptible," she repeated. "Sometimes I wish you were stronger. You are too much afraid of what people will think of you. This death has meant nothing at all to you, but you are ashamed to say so."

"It has meant something to me," he said. "I don't mean that I felt a wrench, as if some one whom I loved very dearly had gone ... I felt that when my father died ... but her death has changed me somehow—here—" and he tapped his breast, "I feel older. I feel as if I had stood over the grave and seen the burial of my youth."

"It has made you gloomy," Elizabeth said. "I think you would have been truer to yourself if you had remained in Paris."

He reflected for a few moments, drinking his tea. He felt sombre enough in his black clothes and black tie—dreary concessions to conventionality.

"Ah, but I wanted to see you, Elizabeth," he said earnestly. "It's terribly lonely without you."

She leaned forward and laid her hand lightly on his, with a soft, caressing touch. "It's good of you to say that," she said, and then, with a frank smile, "tell me, Humphrey, do you really miss me very much?"

"I do," he said; and he began talking of himself and all that he did in Paris. Elizabeth listened with an amused smile playing about her lips. He told her of his work and his play, growing enthusiastic over Paris, speaking with all the self-centredness of the egotist.

[324]

"It seems very pleasant," she said. "You are to be envied, I think. You ought to be very happy: doing everything that you want to do; occupying a good position in journalism."

He purred mentally under her praise. Already he felt better; her presence stimulated him; but he could not see, nor understand, the true Elizabeth, for the mists of vanity, ambition and selfishness clouded his vision at that moment. If only he had forgotten himself ... if only he had asked her one question about herself and her work, or shown the smallest interest in anything outside his own career, he might have risen to great heights of happiness.

This was the second in which everything hung in the balance. He saw Elizabeth lean her chin in the palm of her hand and contemplate reflectively the distance beyond him. He marked the beauty of her lower arm, bare to the rounded charm of the elbow, as it rested on the curve of the arm-chair. So, he thought, would she sit in Paris, and grace his life.

And then, suddenly, her face became grave, and she said, abruptly:

"Humphrey, I want to talk to you very seriously. I want to know whether you will give up journalism."

He remembered her hint of this far back in the months when she had first allowed him to tell her of his love. He had thought the danger was past, but now she came to him, with a deliberate, frontal attack on the very stronghold of his existence.

"Give up journalism!" he echoed. "What for?"

All the weapons of her sex were at her command. She might have said, "For me"; she might have smiled and enticed and cajoled. But she brushed these weapons aside disdainfully. Hers was the earnest business of putting Humphrey to the test.

[325]

"Because I think you and I will never be happy together if you do not. Because, if I marry you (he noticed she did not say, 'When I marry you'), I should not want your work to occupy a larger place in our lives than myself. Because I hate your work, and I think you can do better things. Those are my reasons."

He stood up and walked to the window, looking out on the trees that made an avenue of the quiet road. A man with a green baize covered tray on his head came round the corner, swinging a bell up and down.

"Well?" she said.

"Oh but look here, Elizabeth," he began, "you spring something like this on me suddenly, and expect me to answer at once...."

"Oh, no! you can have time to think it over. You've had nearly a year, you know."

"How do you make that out?"

"Have you forgotten? When you were going to Paris—before you were going to Paris even—I tried to show you that I wanted you to give up the work. I remember you promised things. You said you'd write books, or do essays for the weeklies...."

"But, dear, you can't make a living writing books—unless you fluke, or unless you're a genius; as for essays for the weeklies, frankly, I don't believe I can do them—I'm not brilliant enough."

"Yes, you are," Elizabeth urged. (Fatal mistake to make, it smoothed all his vanity the right way.) "I believe in you, Humphrey. If I didn't believe in you, I wouldn't be talking as I am now. And, besides, I've told you before, I have enough for us both."

Though she was offering him freedom; though, if he wished, he could accept her offer and be rid for ever from the torments of Fleet Street, he could not leave its joys.

[326]

"You don't understand," he said. "You couldn't expect me to live on you...."

"Why not? I should be prepared to live on you, if I were poor."

"That's different. You're a woman."

She laughed. "We won't go into the side-issues of arguments over ethics," she said. "You need not live on me. You told me that you had saved four hundred pounds. If we lived simply that would keep us both for a start, and you could be adding to your income by writing. Humphrey, don't you see I'm trying to rescue you. I want you to do something fine and noble; I want you to go forward."

"Well, I've gone forward," he said. "I've made myself in the Street. You don't know what you ask when you want me to give it up. Nobody can understand it unless he's been in the game. I can't think what it is—it isn't vanity, because all that we write is unsigned; it's sheer love of the work that drives us on."

"But you hate it, too."

"We hate it as fiercely as we love it..." he said, simply. "One day we say to ourselves, 'We will give it up.' That's what I say to you, now. I'm going to give it up, one day."

"That you have also promised............