“But why didn’t you wait?” said Blake.  “What were they thinking of to let you come in this down-pour?”

“They couldn’t help it.”  Muriel raised herself with a great sobbing sigh.  “It was nobody’s fault but my own.  I wanted to get away.  Oh, Blake, do you know—­Nick is here?”

Blake started.  “What?  Already?  Do you mean he is actually in the place?”

She nodded.  “He came up in a motor while we were playing.  I suppose he is staying at Redlands, but I don’t know.  And—­and—­Blake, he has lost his left arm.  It makes him look so queer.”  She gave a sudden, uncontrollable shudder.  The old dumb horror looked out of her eyes.  “I thought I shouldn’t mind,” she said, under her breath.  “Perhaps—­if you had been there—­it would have been different.  As it was—­as it was—­” She broke off, rising impetuously to her feet, and laying trembling hands upon his arms.  “Oh, Blake,” she whispered, like a scared child.  “I feel so helpless.  But you promised—­you promised—­you would never let me go.”

Yes, he had promised her that.  He had sworn it, and, sick at heart, he remembered that in her eyes at least he was a man of honour.  It had been in his mind to tell her the simple truth, just so far as he himself was concerned, and thereafter to place himself at her disposal to act exactly as she should desire.  But suddenly this was an impossibility to him.  He realised it with desperate self-loathing.  She trusted him.  She looked to him for protection.  She leaned upon his strength.  She needed him.  He could not—­it almost seemed as if in common chivalry he could not—­reveal to her the contemptible weakness which lay like a withering blight upon his whole nature.  To own himself the slave of a married woman, and that woman her closest friend, would be to throw her utterly upon her own resources at a time when she most needed the support and guidance of a helping hand.  Moreover, the episode was over; so at least both he and Daisy resolutely persuaded themselves.  There had been a lapse—­a vain and futile lapse—­into the long-cherished idyll of their romance.  It must never recur.  It never should recur.  It must be covered over and forgotten as speedily as might be.  They had come to their senses again.  They were ready, not only to thrust away the evil that had dominated them, but to ignore it utterly as though it had never been.

So, rapidly, the man reasoned with himself with the girl’s hands clasping his arm in earnest entreaty, and her eyes of innocence raised to his.

His answer when it came was slow and soft and womanly, but, in her ears at least, there was nothing wanting in it.  She never dreamed that he was reviling himself for a blackguard even as he uttered it.

“My dear little girl, there is nothing whatever for you to be afraid of.  You’re a bit overstrung, aren’t you?  The man isn’t living who could take you from me.”

He patted her shoulder very kindly, soothing her with a patient, almost fatherly tenderness, and gradually her panic of fear passed.  She leaned against him with a comforting sense of security.