“I think the women who keep their hearts have an even chance, at least, of having heart—­”

“Ah, there’s where you’re wrong!”

“But mine isn’t mine to give you, anyhow.  And now I don’t want you ever to speak to me about this again.”

“Oh, there’s no danger!” he cried, bitterly.  “I shall never willingly see you again.”

“That’s as you like, Mr. Beaton.  We’ve had to be very frank, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t be friends.  Still, we needn’t, if you don’t like.”

“And I may come—­I may come here—­as—­as usual?”

“Why, if you can consistently,” she said, with a smile, and she held out her hand to him.

He went home dazed, and feeling as if it were a bad joke that had been put upon him.  At least the affair went so deep that it estranged the aspect of his familiar studio.  Some of the things in it were not very familiar; he had spent lately a great deal on rugs, on stuffs, on Japanese bric-a-brac.  When he saw these things in the shops he had felt that he must have them; that they were necessary to him; and he was partly in debt for them, still without having sent any of his earnings to pay his father.  As he looked at them now he liked to fancy something weird and conscious in them as the silent witnesses of a broken life.  He felt about among some of the smaller objects on the mantel for his pipe.  Before he slept he was aware, in the luxury of his despair, of a remote relief, an escape; and, after all, the understanding he had come to with Alma was only the explicit formulation of terms long tacit between them.  Beaton would have been puzzled more than he knew if she had taken him seriously.  It was inevitable that he should declare himself in love with her; but he was not disappointed at her rejection of his love; perhaps not so much as he would have been at its acceptance, though he tried to think otherwise, and to give himself airs of tragedy.  He did not really feel that the result was worse than what had gone before, and it left him free.

But he did not go to the Leightons again for so long a time that Mrs. Leighton asked Alma what had happened.  Alma told her.

“And he won’t come any more?” her mother sighed, with reserved censure.

“Oh, I think he will.  He couldn’t very well come the next night.  But he has the habit of coming, and with Mr. Beaton habit is everything—­even the habit of thinking he’s in love with some one.”

“Alma,” said her mother, “I don’t think it’s very nice for a girl to let a young man keep coming to see her after she’s refused him.”

“Why not, if it amuses him and doesn’t hurt the girl?”

“But it does hurt her, Alma.  It—­it’s indelicate.  It isn’t fair to him; it gives him hopes.”

“Well, mamma, it hasn’t happened in the given case yet.  If Mr. Beaton comes again, I won’t see him, and you can forbid him the house.”

“If I could only feel sure, Alma,” said her mother, taking up another branch of the inquiry, “that you really knew your own mind, I should be easier about it.”