"You are a most incomprehensible creature, my dear Clara. During the years I knew you I paid you as high a compliment as a man can pay a woman—by holding you in the highest esteem and entertaining for you the most honorable admiration. And you repay it—by this."
"You flouted and laughed at me and scorned me," she cried vehemently.
"You mean I did not make love to you. Let us be frank with one another. Being what I was, I could not make love to you honorably; and because I held you in too high esteem to do so dishonorably will you say I scorned you?"
"Your Highness kept the fact of your noble birth very secret," she snapped, with an accent on the "highness" I did not like.
I began to fear how much she knew.
"I had the strongest reasons, but it was not done to make so clever a woman as yourself my enemy."
"Then you succeeded unwittingly. One of the prerogatives of your sudden and unexpected inheritance."
"Well, we are fighting the air—an unprofitable waste of effort. If you won't tell me, as a friend, anything about yourself, then, as an enemy, tell me in what way I can oblige you by letting you injure me?"
She laughed unpleasantly.
"So you are not altogether free from alarm that I can injure you? You are right; I can."