"It is not true! How can men speak such lies? Lieutenant Clutterbuck! I know--he told me the same story. It would have been much easier, so much franker, had he said outright he was tired of his--friendship for me and wished an end to it. I should have liked him the better had he been so frank. But that he should tell you the same story. Oh! it is despicable--and you believe it?" she challenged me. "You believe that story. You believe, too, I went to a trysting with Cullen on Castle Down, the night you came, and kept it secret from you and let you run the peril of your life. You will have it, in a word, whatever I may say or do," and she wrung her hands with a queer helplessness. "You will have it that I love him. Pity, a sense of injustice, a feeling that I wrongly possess what is rightly his--these things you will not allow can move me. No, I must love him."
"Have I not proof you do?" I answered. "Not from Clutterbuck, but from yourself. Have I not proof into what despair your love could throw you?" And I took from my pocket the silk scarf. "Where did I get this?"
She took it from my hands, while her face softened. She drew it through her fingers, and a smile parted her lips. She raised her eyes to me with a certain shyness, and she answered shyly:
"Yet you say you were not curious to know anything of me in London before you started to the West."
The answer was no answer at all. I repeated my question:
"How do I come to have that scarf?"
"I can but guess," she said; "I did not know that Lieutenant Clutterbuck possessed it. But it could be no one else. You asked it of Lieutenant Clutterbuck in London."
For a moment I could not believe that I had heard a right. I stared at her. It was impossible that any woman could carry effrontery to so high a pitch. But she repeated her words.
"Lieutenant Clutterbuck gave it to you no doubt in London, and--will you tell me?--I should like to know. Did you ask him for it?"
Should I strip away this pretence? Should I compel her to own where I found it and how I came by it? But it seemed not worth while. I turned on my heel without a word, and went straight out through the open door and on to the hillside.