“I don’t agree with you. I feel that when he trusted me—cannot you see that he made it a question of honour with me? Haven’t you heard of a soldier’s parole? I have broken my parole. That’s what I feel.”
“My dearest girl, do you fancy that parole can be a one-sided agreement? Is your sense of honour to be entrapped by sophistry? Talk of parole—a man to whom you consider yourself bound by a promise releases you from the consequence of this promise, and then tells you that though you promised not to run away, and though he releases you from that promise he trusts in your honour not to run away. What sophistry is this? It might do well enough for a political juggler, but it is not for such people as you or I. You didn’t say to him, did you?—‘I agree to be bound to you by the faith which we have in each other.’”
“He took care to give me no chance of replying to him one way or another.”
“Then cannot you perceive that he had no claim on you?”
She was silent. The fact was that she did not perceive it. But undoubtedly the way he proved the point was agreeable to her. Of course it is quite possible for a man to prove a point to a woman’s satisfaction and yet to leave her unsatisfied as to whether or not his contention is correct. Pierce Winwood had proved to this young woman that she had been well within her rights in accepting him as her lover, and yet she had an uneasy feeling that she had done the other man a wrong. An old rhyme went jingling through her brain, with all the irritating force of a milk cart hurrying for a train—something about the advisability of being off with the old love before being on with the new.
But that was just what she had done: she had been strictly conscientious. She had written to Ernest Clifton asking to be released from the promise which she had made to him and he had freed her—what the young man beside her said was perfectly true: she had not been a party to the parole—it had been forced upon her. She had not consented to it. Nothing in the world could be clearer than this.
And yet the result of thinking over it all was to leave her with a feeling of uneasiness in respect of her own action and of still greater uneasiness in respect of his sense of honour.
“Don’t think anything more about the business,” said he.
“I will not,” she said. “I will not; after all, did not he try to trick me, and why should not I, if I saw that—that—— But you—well, I have made a confession to you at any rate, and that’s something, isn’t it? You are not angry?”
“Angry—I—angry——”