f from
your chariot wheels. I am not afraid of being crushed, for no doubt you
would always remember to be polite, if not considerate. I am not sure
that you would even permit me to become unrecognizable with dust. But I
am no longer plastic. I am thirty-two, and I am as much I as you are
you. I shall watch you from afar with great interest, and I sincerely
hope, for both your sakes, that Miss Otis will succeed in marrying you.
I cannot fancy anything more suitable."

He had turned white, but he looked at her steadily. He felt as if the
round globe were slipping from under him; and vaguely wondered if she
had gone about alluding to him as "the marquess." Then he sprang to his
feet, lifted her forcibly from her chair, deposited her on the sofa, and
taking her in his arms defied her to dismiss him, to live without him.
As the body, so yielding before, declined even to become rigid in
resistance, he poured out such a flood of pleading that, believing
passion had conquered reason, she flung her arms about his neck and
offered to marry him on the morrow if he would promise to remain in
England. But there was a crystal quality in Gwynne's intellect that no
passion could obscure. He merely renewed his pleadings; and then she
slipped out of his embrace and rose to her feet.

"We are wasting time," she said. "I always drive before dinner, and I
cannot go out in a tea-gown." She paused a moment to summon from her
resources the words that would humiliate him most and slake the desire
for vengeance that shrieked within her. She had never hated any one so
bitterly before, not even in her youth, when snubs were frequent. For
the third time she watched a coronet slip through her strong determined
impotent fingers. She could forgive her husband and Brathland their
untimely deaths, but for this young man, passionately in love with her,
who tossed the dazzling prize aside as an actor might a "property
crown," she felt such a rage of hatred that for almost a moment she
thought of giving her inherited self the exquisite satisfaction of
scratching his eyes out. But it was too late in her day to be wholly
natural, and, indeed, she preferred the weapons the world and her
ambitions had given her. As he rose and stared at her doubtingly, she
said, without a high or a sharp note, in her clear lisping voice:

"I think it wise to put an end to all this by telling you that I was
engaged to Lord Brathland when he died. I was more in love with him