watching her like an ambushed assassin, she was confident in a
conception of the world which excluded any such happening. He was
standing by the mantelpiece fastening his furry storm-gloves, and though
he found it teasing to adjust the straps in the shadow, he would not
step into the light and look down on his hands. For his little eye was
set on Ellen, and it was dull with speculation as to whether she knew
what he had meant to do to her that moment when the knocking came at the
door. Because the thing that he had meant to do seemed foul when he
looked on her honourably held little head and her straight blue smock,
he began to tamper with reality, so that he might believe himself not to
have incurred the guilt of that intention. Surely it had been she that
had planned that thing, not he? Girls were nasty-minded and were always
thinking about men. He began to remember the evening all over again,
dusting with lasciviousness each of the gestures that had shone with
such clear colours in his sight, dulling each of the sentences by which
she had displayed to him her trimly-kept mental accoutrement until they
became simpering babble, falsifying his minute memory of the scene until
it became a record of her lust instead of his. Something deep in him
stated quietly and glumly that he was now doing a wrong far worse than
the thing that he had planned, and, though he would not listen, it was
making him so sensible that the essence of the evening was his
degradation that he felt very ill. If the palpitation of his heart and
the shortness of his breath continued he would have to sit down and then
she would be kind to him. He would never forgive her for all this
trouble she had brought on him.

When she could no longer hold it in she exclaimed artlessly, "Yon Mr.
Yaverland's a most interesting man."

He searched for an insult and felt resentful of the required effort, for