‘But that was not a promise to pay. If you will remember it was only an offer, which is a very different thing. You did not accept it then!’ She was herself somewhat desperate, or she would not have sailed so close to the wind.

‘Ah, but I accepted later!’ he said quickly, feeling in his satisfaction in an epigrammatic answer a certain measure of victory. He felt his mistake when she went on calmly:

‘Offers like that are not repeated. They are but phantoms, after all. They come at their own choice, when they do come; and they stay but the measure of a breath or two. You cannot summon them!’ Leonard fell into the current of the metaphor and answered:

‘I don’t know that even that is impossible. There are spells which call, and recall, even phantoms!’