Eve's headache, undoubtedly, was a mere pretence for not
accompanying Patty to-day. She had desired to be alone, and--this
he discovered no less clearly--she wished the friendship between
him and Patty to be fostered. With what foolish hope? Was she so
shallow-natured as to imagine that he might transfer his affections
to Patty Ringrose? it proved how strong her desire had grown to be
free from him.

The innocent Patty (_was_ she so innocent?) seemed not to suspect
the meaning of her friend's talk. Yet Eve must have all but told her
in so many words that she was weary of her lover. That hateful
harping on "gratitude"! Well, one cannot purchase a woman's love. He
had missed the right, the generous, line of conduct. That would have
been to rescue Eve from manifest peril, and then to ask nothing of
her. Could he but have held his passions in leash, something like
friendship--rarest of all relations between man and woman--might
have come about between him and Eve. She, too, certainly had never
got beyond the stage of liking him as a companion; her senses had
never answered to his appeal He looked back upon the evening when
they had dined together at the restaurant in Holborn. Could he but
have stopped at _that_ point! There would have been no harm in such
avowals as then escaped him, for he recognised without bitterness
that the warmth of feeling was all on one side, and Eve, in the
manner of her sex, could like him better for his love without a
dream of returning it. His error was to have taken advantage--
perhaps a mean advantage--of the strange events that followed. If
he restrained himself before, how much more he should have done so
when the girl had put herself at his mercy, when to demand her love
was the obvious, commonplace, vulgar outcome of the situation? Of