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 He must have known that it was too late now to ask such a thing. An hour earlier, before Fergus had intruded upon them, he might have succeeded. But everything was changed now. For an instant, during the time Fergus had been there, she had caught a glimpse of the old, familiar Richard, the mocking one; and the sense of conflict had risen once more sharply between them.

"How could I do that?" she asked, and after a moment's silence, "I can't do that sort of thing. It is impossible for me. . . ."

He smiled. "But the world believes it of you already. The world will not care. The world expects it of you. It can make no difference . . . and when the divorce is finished we will be married."

Her answer was colored with a sudden bitterness. "You would not have said such a thing to me once."

It was true. There was a difference now, of a kind she had not thought of before. It was a difference which had to do with age and all the slow hardening which had come with each year that stood between them and the hot afternoon in the Babylon Arms. Something had gone from them both. . . the warmth, the gallantry, the glow that had made him then so reckless, so willing to marry her, a poor nobody, in the face of all his world. It was gone from her too. . . . She knew exactly what it was now. It was the thing which she had felt slip from her as a cloak on the night she sat talking with Thérèse in the dark library on Murray Hill. They were no longer young. They weighed chances now, cynically looking upon their problem without regard for honor. The tragedy was that they could never go back. What was gone was gone forever. And in the memory of the fierce, youthful passion, so fresh and turbulent, this new love seemed to her an obscene and middle-aged emotion.

"No," she repeated. "I can't do that. It is to myself that it matters. . . . What the world thinks does not interest me."

Long after midnight Callendar at last stirred himself and bade her good night. They had talked, long and passionately,