"She'll spoil that frock if she goes on crying," he said to himself, "and it was very expensive."
"I have nothing but remorse to offer in atonement," she went on. "But that remorse is very sincere——"
Mario Escobar swept her plea aside with a furious gesture.
"So that's it!" he cried. "You were just making a fool of me!" That she, this pretty pink and white girl, should have been making a show of him, parading him before her friends, exhibiting him, using him as a challenge—just as in fact he had been using her, and with more success! Only to think of it hurt him like a knife. "Your remorse!" he cried scornfully. "There's some one else, of course!"
Joan sat up straight and stiff. Escobar might have laid a lash across her delicate shoulders.
"Yes," she said defiantly.
"Some one who was not here a week ago?"
"Yes."
To Escobar's humiliation was now added a sudden fire of jealousy. For the first time to-night, as woman, as flesh and blood, she was adorable, and she owed this transformation, not to him, no, not in the tiniest fraction of a degree to him, but to some one else, some dull boor without niceties or deftness, who had stormed into her life within the week. Who was it? He had got to know. But Joan was hardly thinking of Escobar. Her eyes were turned from him.
"He has set me free from many vanities and follies. If I am grieved and ashamed now, I owe it thankfully to him. If my remorse is bitter, it is because through him I have a gleam of light which helps me to understand."