The Last Days of a Rake

conventional morality. Pride had led to this wager, and to win he must despoil and betray a girl he quite liked.
    The only alternative was to admit he had not done the deed and pay up. Which was the lesser of two evils? Before he could resolve to leave, he saw her running on fleet, bare feet across the dew-pearled grass below the cottage folly, holding her filmy draperies above the soaking turf. He caught his breath, entranced by her loveliness. He should leave and never look back; let her find happiness and love, or at least contentment and marriage. In the space between two heartbeats, though, his better intentions died, for he thought of the sneer of his fellow gamblers should he confess he balked. After all, he rationalized, he would do nothing to Susan that she did not agree to. He was not a brute. But if she submitted…
    Her first words, though, were spoken in a breathless whisper. “I cannot stay,” she said. “My chaperone is suspicious, I fear, and may check on me in my room.”
    He gazed at her moonlit face turned up to his. It was an out, should he decide to take it. But he saw the color rise in her cheeks and knew it was a lie. She was playing her hand, and with that sly wager, he was freed from the doubts that had been plaguing him. They would play on, and see who was the better gambler. “You had better go, then,” he said, his voice husky with desire. She was lovely, and he wanted her. But he had to control that yearning and stay focused on the game. “I will leave tomorrow. Then there will be no reason for suspicion on her part.”
    Susan’s lip quivered. She had not expected that response. “Edgar, I—” She stopped and chewed her lip, her lovely oval face framed by tumbled blonde locks, the whole lit by gleaming moonlight. “I don’t want you to go,” she said, touching his arm with one soft, white, gloveless hand, as delicate as a snowy dove lighting on his shirtsleeve.
    “I think I was mistaken, Susan,” he said, giving his tone the tremor of wounded sensibility. He had always excelled at amateur theatrics.
    “Mistaken? About what?”
    He searched her eyes. “I think, perhaps, your feelings for me are not as strong as mine for you.”
    “But that’s not true!” She threw herself into his arms.
    “Isn’t it?” he asked, his tone cold. He disengaged himself from her clinging arms. “If you loved me, you would dare anything for my sake.”
    “But I will.” She paused, tears welling in her eyes. “Give me another chance, Edgar, please!”
    Triumph built to a crescendo in his being. She was his for the taking, her fear of losing him more alive than her fear of ruin. The balance was tipped in his favor. He took her hand, led her into the dark cottage and closed the door behind them.

    Far from the magnificent physical experience he had expected it to be, it was cold and unpleasant, the cottage not being fitted out for seduction. Afterward, she cried. He felt like a brutish oaf unfit to touch her lily-white flesh. It was an unpleasant feeling, and it burrowed into his heart like a worm into an apple. There was a moment of potential, when the awful situation could have been rescued and turned to a profit for Susan. If she had stopped crying, and let him take her in his arms to comfort her, he may have proposed out of guilt.
    How much of life turns on a moment, like a globe on an axis?
    She hunched her shoulder against him when he touched her arm, and the continuous weeping eventually hardened him in ways he didn’t understand. How could he sit in the dark, listening to her sobs, and be so cold? At first his heart had been full of remorse, then he just felt nothing, but after twenty minutes of such torment, anger flared. She made him feel like a reprehensible ruffian, and he was accustomed to thinking well of himself. He was a scoundrel, but not cruel, a rapscallion but not brutish, he had always thought.
    “Susan,” he said, trying to keep his voice gentle. “It’s not so bad, you know. Many girls do it. And like it.”
    He could not see her face in the dark cottage, but her voice had an hysterical edge as she said, “Many girls? Edgar, am I just one of a hundred?”
    “Not a hundred. Don’t be ridiculous,” he said sharply.
    “I’m not being ridiculous. That was…that was torture! You’re wicked to do such a hideous thing, and I don’t believe that other girls do it.” She sobbed again then, wailing louder, the sound echoing in the tiny folly.
    He clapped his