“You’ve got the best bargain in the world,” she exclaimed.  “You want a man’s love—­you’ve got it—­haven’t you?  And yet you’re free—­as free as air.  If you should tire—­”

Sally laughed bitterly.

“Very well, then, if he should tire, you’re your own mistress.  All this caging of wild birds seems to me to be futile.  Morals?  Oh, morals be hanged!  Are you going to call yourself immoral because the man has no great respect for matrimony?”

“Yes; but I have.”

“You have!  That’s only because you were dragged up in a rectory, just outside the church door.  I can’t understand you.  You’ve shaken off your belief in lots of things—­you don’t believe in the actual divinity of Christ—­yet you cling to an antiquated sacrament that dates back long before the time of a man whose statement that he was the actual Son of God you’re prepared to doubt.  It’s only because you labour under the misapprehension—­as nearly everybody does—­that marriage is a convenience to a woman.  It’s the inconvenience of the thing that makes the morality or the immorality in your mind.  You’re only a conventionalist like everybody else-you’re not a moralist.”

Yet, notwithstanding all these arguments of Janet’s, there were dark moments during that week before she left Kew, when all the force of dogma, all the waves of conventionality, beat against her breast; but it was her faith in love that held her to the end; just as his faith in the dogma itself, had held the Rev. Samuel Bishop to the teachings of his Church.  Love, she made the high altar of her worship; to that, unconsciously, she offered all prayers, made all sacrifice.  These dark moments hung heavy in her heart so long as they were present; but one meeting with Traill was sufficient to drive them in a body from her mind—­gloomy phantoms of imagination which, in the night, have vivid reality, and with the first welcome break of morning are stricken out of sight.

When forty-five of the sixty pounds had been spent and she had bought every conceivable thing that she required, purchasing from habit where things were cheapest, she had brought the remainder back to Traill.

He held her face, crumpling it, in his hands.

“What on earth sort of a child are you?” he asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Why—­I give you a certain amount of money to spend on clothes and you bring me back fifteen pounds like the little girl coming back with change from the grocer’s.”

“But I’ve got everything I want,” she replied, laughing.

“Have you got an opera cloak?”

“No, I don’t want that.”

“Have you got an umbrella?”

She laughed again—­head thrown back, like a child at its father’s knee.

“No, I have one of my own already.”

“Did you get a—­get a—­oh, I don’t know—­did you get boots for tramping through the country with—­boots for show, boots for wear, boots for comfort?  How many pair of boots did you get?”