Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue.
"And even when you had told her that--"

"Even when I had told her that I had _had_ no status--that I had never
stood anywhere, in any sense she meant," said Mrs. Vervain,
slowly--"even then she wasn't satisfied, it seems."

He uttered an uneasy exclamation. "She didn't believe you, you mean?"

"I mean that she _did_ believe me: too thoroughly."

"Well, then--in God's name, what did she want?"

"Something more--those were the words she used."

"Something more? Between--between you and me? Is it a conundrum?" He
laughed awkwardly.

"Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer forbidden
to contemplate the relation of the sexes."

"So it seems!" he commented. "But since, in this case, there wasn't
any--" he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.

"That's just it. The unpardonable offence has been--in our not
offending."

He flung himself down despairingly. "I give it up!--What did you tell
her?" he burst out with sudden crudeness.

"The exact truth. If I had only known," she broke off with a beseeching
tenderness, "won't you believe that I would still have lied for you?"

"Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?"

"To save you--to hide you from her to the last! As I've hidden you from
myself all these years!" She stood up with a sudden tragic import in
her movement. "You believe me capable of that, don't you? If I had only
guessed--but I have never known a girl like her; she had the truth out
of me with a spring."

"The truth that you and I had never--"

"Had never--never in all these years! Oh, she knew why--she measured us
both in a flash. She didn't suspect me of having haggled with you--her
words pelted me like hail. 'He just took what he wanted--sifted and
sorted you to suit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left a heap of
cinders. And you let him--you let yourself be cut in bits'--she mixed
her metaphors a little--'be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while
all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him! But he's
Shylock--and you have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut
out of you.' But she despises me the most, you know--far the most--"
Mrs. Vervain ended.

The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they
seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind
of intimacy on which at any moment, a visitor migh