"Fenella!"
"We were to be friends, we were to help one another. To-night I am afraid and I think that I am a little remorseful. It was my doing that you dined to-night with Andrea. I have wanted to bring you, too, into the life that my brother lives, into the life where I also make sometimes excursions. It is not a wicked life, but I do not know that it is a wise one. I was foolish. It was wrong of me to disturb you. After all, you are good and solid and British, you were meant for the other ways. Forget everything. It is less than a week since you came first to dine with us. Blot out those few days. Can you?"
"Not while I live," Arnold replied. "You forget that it was during those few days that I met you."
"But you are foolish," she declared, laying her hand upon his and smiling into his face, so that the madness came back and burned in his blood. "There is no need for you to be a gambler, there is no need for you to stake everything upon these single coups. You haven't felt the call. Don't listen for it."
"Fenella," he whispered hoarsely, "what was I doing when Samuel Weatherley was shipwrecked on your island!"
She laughed.
"Oh, you foolish boy!" she cried. "What difference would it have made?"
"You can't tell," he answered. "Has no one ever moved you, Fenella? Have you never known what it is to care for any one?"
"Never," she replied. "I only hope that I never shall."
"Why not?"