"Confound you, I didn't want it," was Lord Bowdon's form of receipt for the cheque; he scribbled it on half a sheet of note paper and signed it "B." This was just what Ashley had expected, and he found new pleasure in the constraint which he had placed on his friend's inclination. He shewed the document to Ora when he next went to see her.
"You were quite right," he said. "Bowdon didn't want the money. Look here."
Ora read the scrawl and sat turning it over and over in her fingers.
"But he had to take it," said Ashley with a laugh of triumph, almost of defiance.
"I should think he'd be a very good friend," said Ora. "If Irene would let him, I mean," she added with a smile. "Do you think he'd lend me a thousand pounds and not want it paid back?" she asked.
"From my knowledge of him," said Ashley, "I'm quite sure he would."
"People do an awful lot of things for me," said Ora with a reflective smile. She paused, and added, "But then other people are often very horrid to me. I suppose it works out, doesn't it?"
Ashley was engaged in a strenuous attempt to make it work out, but he had little idea in what way the balance of profit and loss, good and evil, pleasure and pain, was to be arrived at.
"You'd do simply anything for me, wouldn't you?" she went on.
Although he had certainly done much for her, yet he felt himself an impostor when she looked in his face and asked him that question. There seemed to him nothing that he would not suffer for her, no advantages, no prospects, and no friendships that he would not forgo and sacrifice for her. But he would not "do simply anything for her." There was much that he would not, as it appeared to him could not, do for her. Else what easier than to say, "We know so-and-so about your husband, and we can find out so-and-so by using the appropriate methods"? What easier than to say, "I'll go in your train to America, and while you win the triumphs I'll do the nosing"? For if he said that to her, if he opened to her the prospect of being rid, once and for all, of Jack Fenning, of levelling the only fence between him and her of which she was conscious, of enabling her to keep her masterpiece and her triumphs and yet not lose her lover, her joy would know no bounds and the world be transfigured for her into a vision of delight. But yet he could not. All was hers short of negativing himself, of ceasing to be what he was, of gulfing his life, his standards, his mind in hers. She judged by what she saw, and set no bounds to a devotion that seemed boundless. But to him her praise was accusation, and he charged himself with giving nothing because he could not give all.