'You hold me responsible still, I see.'
'Oh, that's our old joke,' she said, fearing to seem too serious in her fanciful claim. 'But still it does always seem to me that we've been in it together; all through it your words have kept coming back, and I've thought of you here. I think you were always in my mind. Well, that's foolish. Anyhow you'll tell me what you think?'
'At least I didn't tell you to trust Fricker.'
'Please don't,' she implored. 'That's the worst of all. That's the thing I can't bear to think of. I thought myself a match for him. And now——!' Her outspread hands accepted any scornful description.
She came to him and put into his hand a paper on which she had drawn up some sort of a statement of her ventures, of her debts, and of her position as she understood it. He took it and glanced through it.
'Heavens, how you spent money!' he exclaimed, in involuntary horror.
She blushed painfully: could she point out how little that had mattered when she was going to be Lady Mervyn?
'And the losses in speculation! You seem never to have been in anything sound!'
'They deceived me,' she faltered. 'Oh, I know all that! Must you say that again? Tell me—what will there be left? Will there be enough to—to exist upon? Or must I'—she broke into a smile of ridicule—'or must I try to work?'