“No,” she replied under her breath—­“you might know I don’t.”

“And so you’re returning this because I said good-bye—­you’re returning this because I said I was not the type of man who hugs the idea of matrimony.  How could you take a gift from such a man—­eh?  I suppose to you it savours almost of an insult.  Yet, have you any conception what your returning it seems to me?”

She shook her head.

“It hurts.  Do you think you’d feel inclined to believe that?  You’d scarcely think I was capable of a wound to sentiment, would you?  I am in this case.  I gave you that, because I couldn’t give you other things.  That bangle was a sort of consolation to my thwarted wish to give.  I’m quite aware that a woman gives most in a bargain; but a man likes to do a little bit of it as well.  Half the jewellers’ shops in London ’ud have to close if he didn’t.  Some of ’em ’ud keep open I know for the women who are bought and prefer the bargain to be settled in kind rather than in cash.  And jewellery pretty nearly always realizes its own value.  But this was a gift—­a substitute for other things that I would rather have given you.”

He paused and looked steadily at her, her head drooping, her fingers idly, nervously bending the woven gold.

“Have you any idea what those other things were?” he asked suddenly.

“No,” she said—­but she did not offer her eyes to convince him of her reply.

“They were the alteration of all your circumstances.  The smashing of the chains that gave you to that damned treadmill of a typewriter—­the unlocking of the door that keeps you mewed-up in that little lodging-house in Kew—­rubbing shoulders with bank-clerks, being compelled to listen to their proposals of suburban marriage, with the prospect of feeding your husband as the stable-boy feeds the horse when it comes back to the manger.  Those were the things I wanted to free you from, and in their place, give you everything you could ask, so far as my limited income permits.  I only wanted to give you the things you ought to have—­the things you should have by right—­the things you were born to.  Your father was a clergyman—­a rector.  Why, down at Apsley, the rector comes and dines—­for the sake of God—­and respectability—­and brings his daughters, dressed in their Sunday best—­with low-necked frocks that make no pretence to be puritanical.  And you slave, day after day, because your father, through no fault of yours, happened to come down in the world, while they sit in a comfortable rectory accepting the invitations of the county.  I wanted to give you things that ’ud make your life brighter—­wanted to give them—­would have found intense pleasure in seeing you take them from me.”

Sally rose with a choking of breath to her feet.  She could bear the strain no longer.  It was like an incessant hammer beating upon her strength, shattering her resolve, until only the desire and the sense were left.  She crossed with unsteady steps to the mantelpiece.  He rose as well, and followed her.