"I wasn't considering him. I was considering ourselves."
"I'm considering her."
"Oh, I know your state of mind. Well, and if he takes the money and goes?"
"She'll be quit of him. It'll be as it was before."
"Will it?" asked Bowdon quietly. The two men regarded one another with a long and steady gaze. Ashley's eyes did not shirk the encounter.
"I mean that," he said at last. "But—." He shrugged his shoulders slightly. He would do his best, but he could answer for nothing. He invited Bowdon to take his stand by him, to fix his attention only on saving her the ordeal which had proved beyond her strength, just to spare her pain, to ask nothing of what lay beyond, not to look too anxiously at the tools they were using or the dirt that the tools might leave on their hands. Bowdon gained a sudden understanding of what Irene Kilnorton had meant by saying that Ora did Ashley infinite harm; but above this recognition and in spite of it rose his old cry so scorned by Irene, "Poor Ora Pinsent!" To him as to Ashley Mead the thought of carrying this man to Ora Pinsent and saying, "You sent for him, here he is," was well nigh intolerable.
They were both men who had lived, as men like them mostly live, without active religious feelings, without any sense of obligation to do good, but bound in the strictest code of honour, Pharisees in the doctrine and canons of that law, fierce to resent the most shamefaced prompting of any passion which violated it. A rebel rose against it—was it not rebellion?—drawing strength from nowhere save from the pictured woe in Ora Pinsent's eyes. They sat smoking in silence, and now looked no more at one another.
"It's got nothing to do with me," Bowdon broke out once.
"Then take back your money," said Ashley with a wave of his hand towards the notes on the table.
"You're on the square with me, anyhow," said Bowdon with a reluctant passing smile. He wished that Ashley had been less scrupulous and had taken his money without telling him what use he meant to put it to.