“You made it yours, it seems to me!”
“Unwillingly.”
“Oh—unwillingly!” Claire laughed her ugliest laugh. “I don’t understand you, Mr. Damier—I began not to understand you this morning”; and, as he made no reply:
“Your present silence doesn’t accord with your past interference.”
“My silence? What do you expect me to say?” Damier asked, with real wonder, forgetting the mother’s intimations.
“Can you deny that—apart from your feelings of angered propriety—you were pitifully jealous last night and this morning? I had to assure you again and again that I did not love him—the truth, as it happens.”
This speech now opened such vistas of interpretation to the past—of interrogation to the future—that Damier could only, speechlessly, look his wonder at her.
“Were you not jealous?” she demanded.
“Not in the faintest degree.”
Her flush deepened at this, an angry, not an embarrassed, flush.