“I want to be engaged a long time, Louis.  We have so much to learn about each other.”

He thought that rather childish.  But whatever had been his motive in the beginning, he was desperately in love with her by that time, and because of that he frightened her sometimes.  He was less sure of himself, too, even after she had accepted him, and to prove his continued dominance over her he would bully her.

“Come here,” he would say, from the hearth rug, or by the window.

“Certainly not.”

“Come here.”

Sometimes she went, to be smothered in his hot embrace; sometimes she did not.

But her infatuation persisted, although there were times when his inordinate vitality and his caresses gave her a sense of physical weariness, times when sheer contact revolted her.  He seemed always to want to touch her.  Fastidiously reared, taught a sort of aloofness from childhood, Lily found herself wondering if all men in love were like that, always having to be held off.

CHAPTER XX

Ellen was staying at the Boyd house.  She went downstairs the morning after her arrival, and found the bread—­bakery bread—­toasted and growing cold on the table, while a slice of ham, ready to be cooked, was not yet on the fire, and Mrs. Boyd had run out to buy some milk.

Dan had already gone, and his half-empty cup of black coffee was on the kitchen table.  Ellen sniffed it and raised her eyebrows.

She rolled up her sleeves, put the toast in the oven and the ham in the frying pan, with much the same grimness with which she had sat the night before listening to Mrs. Boyd’s monologue.  If this was the way they looked after Willy Cameron, no wonder he was thin and pale.  She threw out the coffee, which she suspected had been made by the time-saving method of pouring water on last night’s grounds, and made a fresh pot of it.  After that she inspected the tea towels, and getting a tin dishpan, set them to boil in it on the top of the range.

“Enough to give him typhoid,” she reflected.

Ellen disapproved of her surroundings; she disapproved of any woman who did not boil her tea towels.  And when Edith came down carefully dressed and undeniably rouged she formed a disapproving opinion of that young lady, which was that she was trying to land Willy Cameron, and that he would be better dead than landed.

She met Edith’s stare of surprise with one of thinly veiled hostility.

“Hello!” said Edith.  “When did you blow in, and where from?”

“I came to see Mr. Cameron last night, and he made me stay.”

“A friend of Willy’s!  Well, I guess you needn’t pay for your breakfast by cooking it.  Mother’s probably run out for something —­she never has anything in the house—­and is talking somewhere.  I’ll take that fork.”

But Ellen proceeded to turn the ham.