from, could not forget;
what is worse, she could not understand. It tortured her, and
concerning it she tormented him constantly, displaying a persistence
that was annoying and pathetic--the persistence of a child. It was as
such that he treated it with yawning indifference, quite as though it
were but a whim which, other things intervening, she would forget.

Other things did intervene. Among them was an adventure in Central
Park. One afternoon a brougham in which she was driving crossed a
victoria where sat a remarkably pretty woman with Loftus at her side.

Marie's eyes filled. Had he struck her he would have hurt her far
less. When next she saw him she told him so. The idea amused him. He
was not a ruffian, only a cad. Like the whim, he waved the little
tragedy away.

"That was Mrs. Annandale," he announced unabashedly, "a very old
friend of mine. I have known her all my life."

"Mrs. Annandale!" Marie exclaimed. "Not the wife of the Mr. Annandale
whom you brought here last year?"

Loftus stared at her. He did not understand. Yet then, neither did
she.

"Why," she continued, "you told me he was to marry a dark young lady."

"Yes," said Loftus, fumbling as he spoke for a cigarette. "But I told
you also not to use that expression. Say girl or young woman. If you
want to be fantastic, say young gentlewoman, but never young lady. You
are right, though. Annandale was to have married a Miss Waldron, but
she threw him over and he married somebody else."

To Marie all this was inexplicable. She did not understand how a man
thrown over by one girl could so speedily marry another. She did not
understand, either, what Loftus could be doing with her. To her mind
driving presupposed an intimacy which acquaintance might explain but
did not excuse. The matter perplexed her, and not unnaturally. It is
only through our own heart that it is possible to attempt to read the
heart of another. In her heart Marie knew that nothing earthly could
induce her to appear as intimate with a man as Loftus had with that
woman. Yet, though she knew that, she knew also that many of her
views, like many of her expressions, were not in tune with the tone of
the set in which Loftus moved.

None the less a fact remained. To her other men did not exist. To him
other women existed. However she tried to console herself with
difference in breeding, that fact, remaining, pricked. It pricked
perhaps the harder because of this particular woman's lo