She flushed, drew back, grew pale.
"I have answered you already," she replied, hurriedly but firmly. "Why must you make me say it again? I don't love you, and that is reason enough why you shouldn't care for me."
"It isn't any reason at all. I should be fond of you anyway. Why, even if you made a guy of me before everybody as you did to-night of that clerical thing"—
"Stop!" Berenice interrupted, her color rising and her eyes shining. "I will not have you speak of Mr. Wynne in that way. What I did was bad enough."
"Berenice," demanded Stanford, regarding her keenly, "do you mean to marry him?"
"You have no right to ask me whom I mean to marry! I am not going to marry you, at least!"
"A clergyman. A man in petticoats! Well, I must say"—
She drew herself up to her full height, looking at him with anger and excitement in her heart so great that they seemed to choke her.
"Do you see this?" she asked, holding up the little mask dangling from her finger. "I fastened this to his cassock to-night. I insulted him in the sight of everybody. Does that look as if"—
"Is that the same mask?" broke in Stanford. "You begged it of me afterward!"