e for weeks and now you turn up with your air
of a grand Bashawe and order people out of my house. You have not been
near me."

The next instant it was as though she tore off some last shred of mental
veiling and threw it aside in her reckless mounting heat of temper.

"Near me!" she laughed scathingly, "For the matter of that when have you
ever been _near_ me? It's always been the same. I've known it for years.
As the Yankees say, you 'wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole.' I'm
sick of it. What did you _do_ it for?"

"Do what?"

"Take possession of me as if I were your property. You never were in
love with me--never for a second. If you had been you'd have married
me."

"Yes. I should have married you."

"There was no reason why you should not. I was pretty. I was young. I'd
been decently brought up--and it would have settled everything. Why
_didn't_ you instead of letting people think I was your mistress when I
didn't count for as much as a straw in your life?"

"You represented more than that," he answered. "Kindly listen to me."

That she had lost her head completely was sufficiently manifested by the
fact that she had begun to cry--which made it necessary for her to use
her handkerchief with inimitable skill to prevent the tears from
encroaching on her brilliant white and rose.

"If you had been in love with me--" she chafed bitterly.

"On the morning some years ago when I came to you I made myself clear to
the best of my ability," he said. "I did not mention love. I told you
that I had no intention of marrying you. I called your attention to what
the world would assume. I left the decision to you."

"What could I do--without a penny? Some other man would have had to do
it if you had not," the letting go rushed her into saying.

"Or you would have been obliged to return to your parents in
Jersey--which you refused to contemplate."

"Of course I refused. It would have been mad to do it. And there were
other people who would have paid my bills."

"Solely because I knew that, I made my proposition. Being much older
than you I realised that other people might not feel the responsibility
binding--and permanent."

She sat up and stared at him. There was no touch of the rancour of
recrimination in his presentation of detached facts. He _was_ different
from the rest. He was always better dressed and the perfection of his
impersonal manner belonged to a world being swept away. He made Mr. Owen
Delamore