"I?" Violet flushes and her eyes grow moist.
"Well, it isn't your fault, after all, and one need not grudge you anything," he says, strangely moved. "Yes, these men want to buy out the whole thing, and you'll have a private fortune of your own that will be stunning! Floyd isn't green at bargain-making. Now they have gone over to tackle Wilmarth, and a sweet time they will have of it. I should like to see the fun. But what am I to do afterward?" and he studies the greensward gloomily.
"You?" she repeats, and the matter settles itself beautifully to her vision. "Why, you will marry Miss Pauline Murray."
"Marry!" Eugene strides up and down with a grim sense of the irony of fate. Once he was asked to marry Miss St. Vincent to save his fortune, now it is Miss Murray. He is a part of the business, to be bandied about and knocked down to the highest bidder.
"You do love her?"
Violet says this with the rarest, tenderest entreaty.
"Love her? No, I do not." He comes nearer to Violet with his eyes aflame, his face pale, and his lips savagely compressed. "Have you been so blind? Did that show deceive you? Why, you must guess, you must know it is you and not she whom I love."
Violet sits astounded. She is too much amazed even to resent this. Surely he cannot have been so deceitful, so false-hearted.
"You like me," she begins, tremulously, "and I am your sister, your brother's wife——"
"And you might have been mine! It maddens me when I think of it."