"I don't know," he said again. "Well, you seemed so in your place at Blent. Somehow you made me feel an interloper. And——" He paused a moment. "Yes, I'm glad," he ended.
"No, no, you mustn't be glad," she cried quickly. "Because it's unendurable, unendurable!"
"To you? It's not to me. I thought it might be. It isn't."
"Yes, to me, to me! Oh, end it for me, Harry, end it for me!"
She was imploring, she was the suppliant. The reversal of parts, strange in itself, hardly seemed strange to Harry Tristram. And it made him quite his old self again. He felt that he had something to give. But her next words shattered that delusion.
"You must take it back. Let me give it back to you," she prayed.
He was silent a full minute before he answered slowly and coldly:
"From anybody else I should treat that as an insult; with you I'm willing to think it merely ignorance. In either case the absurdity's the same." He turned away from her with a look of distaste, almost of disgust. "How in the world could you do it?" he added by way of climax.
"I could do it. In one way I could." She rose as he turned back to her. "I want you to have Blent. You're the proper master of Blent. Do you think I want to have it by accident?"