ady Mallory's. Yes, for that I was to
blame. Only, some day I think you will see that I was right, that it
would never have done."

"Never have done!" he repeated, with an accent full of grieved
resentment. "I think it would have done so admirably. I hardly
understand----"

"I mean," said poor Mary helplessly, "that you estimated me wrongly.
I _am_ frivolous--your interests would not have been safe in my hands.
You would have married me on a misunderstanding."

"No," said Charles morosely, "I can't believe that! You are not
plain with me, you are not sincere. You don't really believe that
you are frivolous, that we should not suit. In what way am I so
impossible? Is it my politics that you object to? I shall be happy
to discuss them with you. I am not intolerant; I should not expect
you to agree with me in everything. You give me no reasons for
this--this absurd prejudice; you are not direct; you indulge in
generalizations."

He spoke in a constrained monotone, which seemed to Mary, in spite
of her genuine regret for the pain she gave him, unreasonably full
of reproach.

"Ah!" she cried sharply, "since I don't love you, is not that a
reason? Oh, believe me," she went on rather wearily, "I have no
prejudice, not a grain. I would sooner marry you than not. Only I
cannot bring myself to feel towards you as a woman ought to the man
she marries. Very likely I shall never marry."

He considered her, half angrily, in silence, with his unanimated
eyes; his dignity suffered in discomposure, and lacking this,
pretentious as it was, he seemed to lack everything, becoming
unimportant and absurd.

"Oh, you will marry!" he said at last sullenly, an assertion which
Mary did not trouble to refute.

He returned the next minute, with a persistency which the girl began
to find irritating, to his charge.

"I don't understand it. They seem to me wilful, unworthy of you,
your reasons; it's perverse--yes, that is what it is, perverse! You
are not really happy here; the life doesn't suit you."

"What a discovery!" cried the girl half mockingly. "I am not really
happy! Well, if I admit it?"

"I could make you so by taking you out of it. You are too good for
it all, too good to sit and pour out tea for--for the sort of people
who come here."

"Do you mean," she asked, with a touch of scorn in her voice, "that
we are not respectable?"

"That is not you who speak," he persisted; "it is your aunt who
speaks through you. I know i