of getting married, with no more shilly-shallying about it."

"On the principle that if you're hanging over a precipice the best
thing you can do is to fall."

He continued to race up and down the room, all nerves and frenzy.
"Don't we care about each other?"

She answered carefully. "I think you care about me to the extent that
you believe I'd make a good mistress of the house your mother left
you, and which, you say, is like an empty sepulcher. If you didn't
have it on your hands, I don't imagine it would have occurred to you
to ask me."

"Well, that's all right. Now what about you?"

"You've already answered that question for yourself." She stiffened
haughtily. "I'm an old maid. I haven't been brought up by Aunt Marion
for nothing. I've an old maid's ways and outlooks and habits. I
resented your saying it a minute ago, and yet it's true. I've known
for years that it was true. It wouldn't be fair for me to marry any
man. So here it is, Rash." Crossing the floor-space she held out the
ring again. "You might as well take it first as last."

He drew back from her, his features screwed up like those of a tragic
mask. "Do you mean it?"

"Do I seem to be making a joke?"

Averting his face, he swept the mere sight of the ring away from him.
"I won't touch the thing."

"And I can't keep it. So there!"

It fell with a little shivery sound to a bare spot on the floor,
rolling to the edge of a rug, where it stopped. Each looked down at
it.

"So you mean to send me to the devil! All right! Just watch and you'll
see me go."

She was walking away from him, but turned again. "If you mean by that
that you put the responsibility for your abominable life on me----"

"Abominable life! Me! Just because I'm not one of the white-blooded
Nancies which your aunt thinks the only ones fit to be called
men----"

But he couldn't go on. He was choking. The sole relief to his
indignation was in once more tearing round the room, while Miss
Walbrook moved to the fluted white mantelpiece, where, with her foot
resting on the attenuated Hunt Diedrich andirons she bowed her head
against an attenuated Hunt Diedrich antelope in bronze.

She was not softened or repentant. She knew she would become so later;
but she knew too that her tempers had to work themselves off by
degrees. Their quarrels having hitherto been rendered worth while by
their reconciliations, she took it for granted that the same thing
would happen once more though, a