“Well?” he said then, with a little challenging laugh.

“Well—­what?”

“I’ve been waiting for your move.  You haven’t made it.”

She shook her head.  “I’ve no move to make.”

“Oh yes, you have—­a great big move.  You can easily say, Check.  I doubt if you can make it, Checkmate.”

“I’m afraid that’s a game I don’t know how to play.”

He stared at her inquiringly—­noting the disdain with which her chin tilted and her lip curled, though he could see it was a disdain suffused with sweetness.

“Do you mean that you wouldn’t—­wouldn’t give me away?”

“I mean that you’re either broaching a topic I don’t understand or speaking a language I’ve never learned.  If you don’t mind, we won’t discuss the subject, and we’ll speak our mother-tongue—­the mother-tongue of people like you and me.”

He stared again.  It took him some few seconds to understand her phraseology.  In proportion as her meaning broke upon him, his face glowed.  When he spoke it was with enthusiasm for her generosity in taking this stand rather than in gratitude for anything he was to gain by it.

“By Jove, you’re a brick!  You always were.  I might have expected that this is exactly what you’d say.”

“I hope so.  I didn’t expect that you’d talk of my giving you away, as you call it—­to any one.”

“But you’re wrong,” he said, with a return to the laughing bravado which concealed his inward repugnance to his position.  “You’re wrong.  I’ll give you that tip now.  I’ll fight fair.  I sha’n’t be grateful.  I’ll profit by your magnanimity.  Remember it’s my part in the world to be unscrupulous.  It has to be.  I’ve told you so.  With me the end justifies the means—­always; and when the end is to keep my word to Evie, it will make no difference to me that you were too high-minded to put the big obstacle in my way.”

“You’ll not expect me to be otherwise than sorry for that—­for your sake.”

“No, I dare say.  But I can’t stop to think of what any one feels for my sake when I know what I feel for my own.”

“Which is only an additional reason for my being—­sorry.  You don’t find fault with me for that?”

“I do.  I don’t want you to be sorry.  I want to convince you.  I want you to see things from my point of view—­how I’ve been placed.  Good Lord! it’s hard enough, without the sense that you’re sitting in judgment on me.”

“I’m not sitting in judgment on you—­except in so far as concerns Evie Colfax.  If it was anybody else—­”

“But it couldn’t be anybody else It’s Evie or no one.  She’s everything on earth to me.  She’s to me what electricity is to the wire—­that which makes it a thing alive.”

“To be a thing alive isn’t necessarily the highest thing.”

“Ah, but that doesn’t apply to me.  It’s all very well for other men to say, ‘All is lost to save honor.’  They have compensations.  I haven’t.  You might as well ask a man to think of the highest thing when he’s drowning.”