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 course she harped on "gratitude." What but a sense of obligation had constrained her?
Something had taken place to-day; he felt it as a miserable certainty.
The man from London had been with her.

She expected him, and had elaborately planned for a day of freedom.