me it was a beginning. I broke the rule of a lifetime to bring you here. Now I don't want you to go back.'
'You'll change your mind again in the morning.' Somehow she tore her gaze away, and broke through his arms. 'Besides, you wouldn't forget a poor girl's honour——'
She was walking along the deck, swinging her wrap with an affectation of sophisticated composure, finding a moment's escape in movement. He walked beside her, speaking of emotion in that terrifying unemotional voice.
'Honour is the virtue of inferior people who can't afford to dispense with it. I have enough money to ignore whatever anyone may think or anyone may say. If you shared it with me, nothing need hurt you.'
'Only myself.'
'No, no. Don't be conventional. That isn't worthy of you. It's my business to understand people. You are the kind of woman who can stand aside and look at facts, without being deluded by any fogs of sentimentality. We speak the same language. That's why I talk to you like this.'
His hand went across and gripped her shoulder, so that she had to stop and turn.
'You are the kind of woman with whom I could forget to be cold.'
He drew her towards him, and she closed her eyes before he kissed her. His mouth was hard, with a kind of rubbery smoothness that chilled her so that she shivered. After a long time he released her. His eyes burned on her like hot coals.
'You'll stay, Loretta?' he said hoarsely.
'No.' She swayed away from him. She felt queerly sick, and the air had become heavy and oppressive. 'I don't know. You're too quick. . . . Ask me again to-morrow. Please.'
'I'm leaving to-morrow.'
'You are?'
'We're going to St Peter Port. I hoped you would come with us.'
'Give me a cigarette.'
He felt in his pockets. The commonplace distraction, thrust at him like that, blunted the edge of his attack.
'I'm afraid I left my case inside. Shall we go in?'
He opened the door, and her hand rested on his arm for a moment as she passed him into the wheelhouse. He passed her a lacquer box and offered her a light.
'You didn't show me this,' she said, glancing round the room. was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the most attractive living-rooms on the ship. At the after end there were shelves of books, half a dozen deep long armchairs invited idleness, a rich carpet covered the floor. Long straight windows ran the length of the beam sides, and the forward end was one curved panel of plate glass in the streamlined shape of the structure. There were flowers in chromium wall brackets, and concealed lights built into the ceiling. The wheel and instrument panel up in one corner, the binnacle in front of it and the littered chart table filling the forward bay, looked almost like property fittings, as if a millionaire's whim had played with the idea of decorating a den in an ordinary house to look like the interior of a yacht.
'We were coming here,' said Vogel.
He did not smoke, and he had an actor's mastery over his unoccupied hands which in him seemed to be only the index of an inhuman restraint. She thought he was gathering himself to recover the mood of a moment ago; but before he spoke again there was a knock on the door.
'What is it?' he demanded sharply—it was the first time she had seen a crack in the glassy veneer of his self-possession.
'Excuse me, sir.'
The steward who had served dinner stood at the door, his saturnine face mask-like and yet obsequiously expressive. He stood there and waited, and Vogel turned to Loretta with an apologetic shrug.
'I'm so sorry—will you wait for me a moment?'
The door closed on the two men, and she relaxed against the back of a chair. The cigarette between her fingers was held quite steadily—there wasn't a crease or an indentation in the white oval paper
