It was shortly after he had said a last good-bye to Lettice Nevern that Caragh's troubles began afresh.  
He had the best intention to acquire the married habit, or a habit, at any rate, that should differ widely from the one he had.
 
With that object he secluded himself for a fortnight from the life to which he was accustomed, and denied his company, for reasons which they vigorously disbelieved, to his friends.
 
He could allow himself the theatre, having never cherished lime-lit illusions, nor hovered to dispel them about the stage door. He had always what he was pleased to call a frugal taste in beauty, and had never made a bid for any that was 'priced'!
 
But the theatres only served him for a week, and even so with some exaggeration of what he wished to see. At the end of a second, he decided that a wife was as essential as repentance to a change of life, and dropped back into his old ways.
 
And the devil, who, perhaps as a reprisal for the deficiencies of his own abode, takes a pleasure in knocking the bottom out of every sort of domicile, at once put his foot through the flooring of Maurice Caragh's reform.
 
At least he met Laura Marton at the dinner which closed his fortnight's sojourn in the wilderness.
 
He was suffering from those two weeks of his own society, but, probably, even without that preparation, he would have capitulated to her charm.
 
To speak of him, so consecutively, in the hands of three women gives too crowded an impression of his susceptiveness. No trait was, in fact, further from his character.
 
Three years were passed since he met Ethel Vernon, and he had not harboured in all of them so much as a vexed thought about a woman's face.
 
He was pleased so far from easily, that he might very readily have failed throughout his life to have been pleased at all. But when pleased, it was on the instant and absorbingly. Ten seconds he had suggested as an average requirement for falling in love, but it is questionable if any of his own declensions had taken half that time. Nor was proximity at all essential. He could not recall, he admitted modestly, having discovered that a woman was adorable at more than a hundred yards. But he had no wish to exalt his own experience into a standard: he could believe in anything up to half a mile.
 
In that, such was the delicacy of his distinctions, he was perfectly sincere; but it was that delicacy which made them so prohibitive to adorations even at half a mile.
 
Laura Marton might, perhaps, have tested such a distance successfully, she was so perfectly his conception of a type.
 
He conceived a good deal in types, and preferred the typical even to the length of its deficiencies.
 
Deficiency did indeed play a part in Laura Marten's attractions, since the broad mouth, the long eyes, and the drowsy luxuriance of her figure were without everything that could make them harmless.
 
She came under the superbs in Caragh's catalogue, and to the superb he was almost a stranger.
 
That, perhaps, speeded his intimacy.
 
"You can take it for granted that I think you magnificent," he said at their first meeting.
 
This was their last. It epitomized sufficiently what had happened in the interval. Some of it might be accounted for by his having told her that the next interval was for ever.
 
The occasion was a dance at a big house in Grosvenor Square. It was Caragh's last appearance as a bachelor in town, since he started on the morrow for a trip which the owners of a new Atlantic liner were taking in her round the Isles. He was to be dropped at Ballindra, where his marriage, for recent family reasons, was after all to take place.
 
He was seated on a lounge in a blind passage near the top of the house, and, though still early in the evening, he had been sitting there for some time.
 
He knew the house more intimately than most of those who were seeking for such seats, and this one was left to him and his partner entirely undisturbed. The music floated up the stairs with varying distinctness, as the dancers choked the entrances to the great gallery below.
 
He was leaning back, with his arms half folded and a hand upon his mouth, looking straight before him.
 
Laura Marton, sitting sideways with one white arm along the top of the lounge and the sweep of her amber-coloured skirts against his feet, bent forward insistently towards him; a braid of gold across her splendid shoulders, and a band of turquoise in her brown hair.
 
The long soft fawn gloves were crumpled in her lap, and her left arm, which hung straight and bare beside her, tapped a turquoise fan against her ankle as she waited for his reply.
 
"I know," he sighed. "You don't and you can't see it: what's the use of my saying it again? You're sure no woman would care for what I'm giving her, if she only knew. I daresay; but, you see, she's not going to know. She's going to luxuriate in an apparent adoration. That's easier than to be happy with one that's inapparent, however actual. And it's a lot likelier that the make-believe will last; because—well, because there's nothing in it not to."
 
He smiled whimsically at his own English, but the girl's face darkened with a frown.
 
"It makes no difference how you put it," she exclaimed hotly; "the thing's detestable! You'll only look at it from your point of view; and because it's costing you so much, you think it must be worth all that to the girl. But it's not! You're getting her life, and everything that's in her and of her, and you're getting it for a lie! You think it's a fine lie, I know, the sort of lie that life is all along. You've told me that! Oh, yes, you have; or something like it. But what are you that you should handle a woman as if you had made her, and lie to her like a god! Do you think you're big enough to make that seem fair?"
 
"Ah, you don't understand," he murmured still staring before him, afraid to stir the fire in her smouldering eyes. "I'm doing this because I'm so small."
 
Her incredulous gasp was almost a repudiation; but she said nothing and he went on:
 
"Because the love that's worth perfidies and desertion and all the other personal superlatives will never come my way. I thought it would: yes! once, long ago. But it hasn't, and it won't. If I was big enough!"—he caught his breath—"Ah, that's another matter. For that love excuses everything—'red ruin and the breaking up of laws'—because it's bigger, and better, and more enduring than the world itself. But it isn't mine."
 
He stopped, and faced for an instant the furious blaze of her eyes. Then he said more slowly:
 
"So the next best thing seemed, for a man like me, to make a good girl's dreams come true; her dreams of love, and honour, and a man's desire ... when one is the man, and can."
 
"You're not the man!" she cried. "And it's wicked and cruel to pretend to be."
 
"Look here!" he said persuasively. "Suppose that you were as poor a thing as I am; suppose that you, too, had come to look for no more from love than it means to me, and that some one came along who took you for an angel; a man young and strong and pure with the one great passion of a lifetime showing all over him; and that, in too weak or too kind a moment you had let him take you in his arms, and let him believe then as true the dreams that he had dreamt of you, and sealed with your kisses the vows which he had sworn. Well! when you'd come to realize that all his strength and sweetness hung on his belief in you, would you call it wicked and cruel to go on with the pretence?"
 
She made no answer for some moments. The grip of her white fingers relaxed upon the couch and the fan hung quiet against her ankle as she continued to absorb him with her devouring eyes.
 
"You've forgotten me," she whispered at length.
 
"No," he protested; "you can't say that, can you? I told you at once."
 
"Told me what?" she demanded.
 
"That I was not free," he said.
 
"Yes," she exclaimed, "the very first time you spoke to me. As if I were certain to lose my heart if I had not been warned. I hated you pretty hotly for it too, I can assure you. And you might have saved yourself the trouble. I'd been told it before."
 
"Before?"
 
"Yes, by Ethel Vernon. She said, when she heard I was to meet you, 'He's going to marry a girl that he doesn't care a sou for.' How did she know?"
 ............