“I knew it,” she cried triumphantly. “Boy, you’re straight.”
He made a wry face as he shook hands with her. Then suddenly he stooped and kissed her.
“It’s the least you can offer me,” he said in explanation.
She laughed, well satisfied. She had not been mistaken; he had vindicated her belief in him.
Chapter Eleven.
Dare, as he sat at the Arnotts’ dinner-table that evening, making the extra man, the odd number, as he had done on a former occasion, was conscious of two discrepant facts; namely, that he had not decided a moment too soon to quit the danger zone of Pamela’s seductive influence, and that he was sincerely sorry he was leaving on the morrow. The regret was, perhaps, the keener sensation of the two; it balanced his sense of moral satisfaction to a nicety. The dinner was the funeral feast of his only real love affair. He intended, when he parted from Pamela that night, never to see her again.
“I was a fool to come,” he told himself. “No one can handle fire and expect to escape unhurt. And I knew it was fire I was playing with.”
Yet he would gladly have continued to act foolishly. The strongest inducement towards wisdom was the fear that Pamela herself might get singed; fire which spreads ends in a conflagration.