She now said sweetly and calmly, so sweetly and so calmly that he, with knowledge of her secret, was alarmed: 'But that was not a promise to pay.

If you will remember it was only an offer, which is a very different thing.

You did not accept it then!' She was herself somewhat desperate, or she would not have sailed so close to the wind.
'Ah, but I accepted later!' he said quickly, feeling in his satisfaction in an epigrammatic answer a certain measure of victory.

He felt his mistake when she went on calmly: 'Offers like that are not repeated.

They are but phantoms, after all.
They come at their own choice, when they do come; and they stay but the measure of a breath or two.