te attention, and trying to speak with good-natured
carelessness, "I'm afraid Edith thought you didn't want her, Nelly." He
was sorry the next moment that he had said even as much as that: Eleanor
was breathing quickly, and her dark, sad eyes were hard with anger.

"I don't," she said

Maurice said, sharply, "You have never liked her!"

"Why should I like her? She talks to you incessantly. And now, she
_looks_ at you; here--before me! Looks at you."

"Eleanor, what on earth--"

"Oh, I saw her, when you were talking over there by the window; I
watched her. She looked at you! I am not blind. I understand what it
means when a girl looks at a man that way. And now she's planning to be
in Mercer for three months? Well, that's simply to be near you. She'd
like to live in the same house with you, I suppose! If it wasn't for me,
she'd be in love with you--perhaps she is, anyhow? Yes, I think she is."
There was a sick silence. "And, perhaps," she said, with a gasp, "you
are in love with her?"

He was dumb. The suddenness of the attack completely routed him--its
suddenness; but more than its suddenness was a leaping question in his
own mind. When she said, "You are in love with her?" an appalled "Am I?"
was on his lips. Instantly he knew, what he had not known, at any rate
articulately, that he was in love with Edith. His thoughts broke in
galloping confusion; his hand, holding the hot bowl of his pipe,
trembled. He tried to speak, stammered, said, with a sort of gasp,
"Don't--don't say a thing like that!" Then he got his breath, and ended,
with a composure that kept his words slow and his voice cold, "It is
terrible to say a thing like that to me."

She flung out her hands. "What more can I do for you than I have done?
Oh, Maurice--Maurice, no woman could love you more than I do?... _Could
they_?"

"I am grateful; I--" He tried to speak gently, but his voice had begun
to shake with angry terror; it was abominable, this thing she had said!
(But ... it was true.) "No; no woman could have done more for me than
you have, Eleanor; I am grateful."

"Grateful? Yes. You give me gratitude." Maurice was speechless. "I
thought, perhaps, you loved me," she said. A minute later he heard her
going upstairs to her own room.

He stood staring after her, open-mouthed. Then he said, under his
breath, "Good God!" After a while he went over to the fireplace,
and, standing with one hand on the mantelpiece, he kicked the charred
logs on