you are quite the most fascinating and generally adorable woman I ever knew, Margaret—­I began to realise, I say, that not even you could ever make me forget that fact.  And I was very properly miserable.  It is extremely queer,” Mr. Kennaston continued, after an interval of meditation, “but falling in love appears to be the one utterly inexplicable, utterly reasonless thing one ever does in one’s life.  You can usually think of some more or less plausible palliation for embezzlement, say, or for robbing a cathedral or even for committing suicide—­but no man can ever explain how he happened to fall in love.  He simply did it.”

Margaret nodded sagely.  She knew.

“Now you,” Mr. Kennaston was pleased to say, “are infinitely more beautiful, younger, more clever, and in every way more attractive than Kathleen.  I recognise these things clearly, but it does not appear, somehow, to alter the fact that I am in love with her.  I think I have been in love with her all my life.  We were boy and girl together, Margaret, and—­and I give you my word,” Kennaston cried, with his boyish flush, “I worship her!  I simply cannot explain the perfectly unreasonable way in which I worship her!”

He was sincere.  He loved Kathleen Saumarez as much as he was capable of loving any one—­almost as much as he loved to dilate on his own peculiarities and emotions.

Margaret’s gaze was intent upon him.  “Yet,” she marvelled, “you made love to me very tropically.”

With unconcealed pride, Mr. Kennaston assented.  “Didn’t I?” he said.  “I was in rather good form last night, I thought.”

“And you were actually prepared to marry me?” she asked—­“even after you knew I was poor?”

“I couldn’t very well back out,” he submitted, and then cocked his head on one side.  “You see,” he added, whimsically, “I was sufficiently a conceited ass to fancy you cared a little for me.  So, of course, I was going to marry you and try to make you happy.  But how dear—­oh, how unutterably dear it was of you, Margaret, to decline to be made happy in any such fashion!” And Mr. Kennaston paused to chuckle and to regard her with genuine esteem and affection.

But still her candid eyes weighed him, and transparently found him wanting.

“You are thinking, perhaps, what an unutterable cad I have been?” he suggested.

“Yes—­you are rather by way of being a cad, beautiful.  But I can’t help liking you, somehow.  I dare say it’s because you’re honest with me.  Nobody—­nobody,” Miss Hugonin lamented, a forlorn little quiver in her voice, “ever seemed to be honest with me except you, and now I know you weren’t.  Oh, beautiful, aren’t I ever to have any real friends?” she pleaded, wistfully.

Kennaston had meant a deal to her, you see; he had been the one man she trusted.  She had gloried in his fustian rhetoric, his glib artlessness, his airy scorn of money; and now all this proved mere pinchbeck.  On a sudden, too, there woke in some bycorner of her heart a queasy realisation of how near she had come to loving Kennaston.  The thought nauseated her.