"But, my dear man, I am bespoke," she reminded him. "You know that quite well. I couldn't possibly think of marrying anybody."

"What are you going to do with that money?" he demanded.

"I think I shall keep it," she decided. "Not to do so would hurt him terribly."

"And keeping it hurts me damnably!" he muttered.

She shook her head at him.

"We've had this over so often, haven't we? I cannot leave Reginald as long as he wants me, relies upon me as much as he does now."

"Why not?" was the almost rough demand. "He has had the best of your life."

"And he has given me a great deal of his," she retorted. "For nineteen years I have been his very dear friend. During all that time he has never broken a promise to me, never told a falsehood, never said a single word which could grate or hurt. If he has sometimes seemed a little aloof, it is because he really believes himself to be a great person. He believes in himself immensely, you know, James--in the privileges and sanctity of his descent. It seems so strange in this world, where we others see other things. If I only dared, I would write a novel about it.""But you don't care for him any more?"  
"Care for him?" she repeated. "How could I ever stop caring for him! He was my first lover, and has been my only one."  
"Let me ask you a question," James Borden demanded suddenly. "Don't you ever feel any grudge against him? He took you away from a very respectable position in life. He ruined all sorts of possibilities. He was fifteen or twenty years older than you were, and he knew the world. You pleased him, and he deliberately entrapped your affections. Be honest, now. Don't you sometimes hate him for it?"  
"Never," she answered without hesitation. "I was, as you say, most respectably placed--a teacher at a village school--and I might have married a young farmer, or bailiff's son, or, with great luck, a struggling young doctor, and lived a remarkably rural life, but, as you have observed, in great respectability. My dear James, I should have hated it. I was, I think, nineteen years old when Reginald, in a most courtly fashion, suggested that I should come to London with him, and I have exactly the same feelings to-day about my acceptance of his proposal as I had then."  
"You are a puzzle," he declared. "You wouldn't be, of course, only you're such a--such a good 

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