"Yes. Come here after a week. And if we can't be alone I'll give you a letter somehow ... Please, Martin—you must."
"Maggie, just think—"
"No—after a week."
"Very well, then," he turned on her fiercely. "I've been honest. I've told you. I've done all I can. If I love you now it isn't my fault."
He left the room, not looking at her again. And she stood there, staring in front of her.
CHAPTER VI
THE PROPHET IN HIS OWN HOME
Martin walked into the street with a confused sense of triumph and defeat, that confusion that comes to all sensitive men at the moment when they are stepping, against their will, from one set of conditions into another. He had gone into that house, only half an hour ago, determined to leave Maggie for ever—for his good and hers. He came back into the street realising that he was now, perhaps for the first time, quite definitely involved in some relation with her—good, bad, safe, dangerous he did not know—but involved. He had intended to tell her nothing of his marriage—and he had told her. He had intended to treat their whole meeting as something light, passing, inconsiderable—he had instead treated it as something of the utmost gravity. He had intended, above all, to prove to himself that he could do what he wished—he had found that he had no power.
And so, as he stepped through the dim gold-dust of the evening light he was stirred with an immense sense of having stepped, definitely at last, across the threshold of new adventure and enterprise. All kinds of problems were awaiting solution—his relation to his father, his mother, his sister, his home, his past, his future, his sins and his weaknesses—and he had meant to solve them all, as he had often solved them in the past, by simply cutting adrift. But now, instead of that, he had decided to stay and face it all out, he had confessed at last that secret that he had hidden from all the world, and he had submitted to the will of a girl whom he scarcely knew and was not even sure that he liked.