"And perhaps--as I am on the verge of freedom--I am not right, after all, in thinking there is any harm in your kissing me." "Oh God!" said Winterborne within himself.

His head was turned askance as he still resolutely regarded the ground.

For the last several minutes he had seen this great temptation approaching him in regular siege; and now it had come.

The wrong, the social sin, of now taking advantage of the offer of her lips had a magnitude, in the eyes of one whose life had been so primitive, so ruled by purest household laws, as Giles's, which can hardly be explained.
"Did you say anything ?" she asked, timidly.
"Oh no--only that--" "You mean that it must BE settled, since my father is coming home ?" she said, gladly.
Winterborne, though fighting valiantly against himself all this while--though he would have protected Grace's good repute as the apple of his eye--was a man; and, as Desdemona said, men are not gods.

In face of the agonizing seductiveness shown by her, in her unenlightened school-girl simplicity about the laws and ordinances, he betrayed a man's weakness.