"What should I have to say?" he asked in turn. "My one claim to celebrity is my being a man utterly devoid of moral fibre. Should I lose that one claim, too?"
"If you have nothing within yourself to hold you up, lean on me," she cried, glowing with eagerness. "Let me be your friend, your adviser, your--"
"Foster-father," he suggested, and swished about the slime with his crop.
She realised that everything she said was lost on him; that he even seized whatever opportunity offered to make merry at her expense.
"Please get up and let me by," she said. "Why should I cast what is best in me before one who is unworthy?"
"Look, comrade," he said, pointing to the dark, mirror-like surface of the water. "A water spider is gliding about there all the time with its legs up and its head down. If you were to ask it why, it would say it doesn't know how to glide differently. That's its nature. What's to be done?"
"A man can restrain himself," she cried, flaring up and casting indignant glances at him. "A man can look up to heights, to an ideal. He can listen to the advice of a friend who means well by him--that's what he can do."
"And what does his friend advise?" he asked flatteringly, while swinging himself nearer.
But this time she did not answer. She covered her face with her hands and cried, cried so that her body shook with sobs.
"For God's sake, sit still," he exclaimed, stretching his arms about her in a wide circle, for she was in danger of losing her balance on the slim, swaying trunk of the mountain-ash. "Do sit still, Lilly, else you'll fall into the water."
She shuddered. She heard nothing of what he said except that sweet, secret, criminal "Lilly," for which she had been longing the whole week.
Then he promised her everything she wanted of him. He wouldn't run after any more servant girls, he wouldn't spend nights boozing with the inspector and the bookkeeper, he wouldn't--oh, what wouldn't he do, if only she stopped crying.
"Your word of honour?" she said, raising her wet, reddened eyes.
"My word of honour," he replied without an instant's hesitation.
"You won't regret it," she said. "I'll be close at hand, I'll be your friend, I will do whatever I can."
"And whatever the two High Mightinesses permit," he added.