She herself was surprised at the spirit of recklessness stealing over her, for there was, after all, a certain appealing glamour in the adventure.  She was thrilled by the swift, gliding motion of the automobile, the weird and unfamiliar character of these upper reaches of a great city in the twilight, where new houses stood alone or m rows on wide levelled tracts; and old houses, once in the country, were seen high above the roadway behind crumbling fences, surrounded by gloomy old trees with rotting branches.  She stole a glance at the man close beside her; a delightful fear of him made her shiver, and she shrank closer into the corner of the seat.

“Honora!”

All at once he had seized her hand again, and held it in spite of her efforts to release it.

“Honora,” he said, “I love you as I have never loved in my life.  As I never shall love again.”

“Oh—­you mustn’t say that!” she cried.

“Why not?” he demanded.  “Why not, if I feel it?”

“Because,” faltered Honora, “because I can’t listen to you.”

Brent made a motion of disdain with his free hand.

“I don’t pretend that it’s right,” he said.  “I’m not a hypocrite, anyway, thank God!  It’s undoubtedly wrong, according to all moral codes.  I’ve never paid any attention to them.  You’re married.  I’m happy to say I’m divorced.  You’ve got a husband.  I won’t be guilty of the bad taste of discussing him.  He’s a good fellow enough, but he never thinks about you from the time the Exchange opens in the morning until he gets home at night and wants his dinner.  You don’t love him—­it would be a miracle if a woman with any spirit did.  He hasn’t any more of an idea of what he possesses by legal right than the man I discovered driving in a cart one of the best hunters I ever had in my stables.  To say that he doesn’t appreciate you is a ludicrous understatement.  Any woman would have done for him.”

“Please don’t!” she implored him.  “Please don’t!”

But for the moment she knew that she was powerless, carried along like a chip on the crest of his passion.

“I don’t pretend to say how it is, or why it is,” he went on, paying no heed to her protests.  “I suppose there’s one woman for every man in the world—­though I didn’t use to think so.  I always had another idea of woman before I met you.  I’ve thought I was in love with ’em, but now I understand it was only—­something else.  I say, I don’t know what it is in you that makes me feel differently.  I can’t analyze it, and I don’t want to.  You’re not perfect, by a good deal, and God knows I’m not.  You’re ambitious, but if you weren’t, you’d be humdrum—­yet there’s no pitiful artifice in you as in other women that any idiot can see through.  And it would have paralyzed forever any ordinary woman to have married Howard Spence.”

A new method of wooing, surely, and evidently peculiar to Trixton Brent.  Honora, in the prey of emotions which he had aroused in spite of her, needless to say did not, at that moment, perceive the humour in it.  His words gave her food for thought for many months afterwards.