"You'll keep your promise to me?" she persisted, softly, with a kind of pitiful relentlessness.
"I'll tell you in a minute."
He jerked out the words in the brusque way in which a man says all that, for the moment, he is physically able to utter. She allowed more time to elapse. The roar of traffic and the clanging of electric trams came up from the street below, but no sound seemed able to penetrate the stillness in which they sat. As far as Miriam was conscious of herself at all, it was simply to note the curious deadness of her emotions, as though she had become a mere machine for doing right, like a clock that strikes punctually. Nevertheless, it caused her some surprise when he raised himself and said, in a voice that would have been casual on a common occasion:
"I suppose you think me a cad?"
"No; why should I?"
"Because I am one."
"I don't know why you should say that, or what it has to do with—anything."
"It's about that—that—promise."
"Oh!"
"Do you mind if we speak quite frankly? I should like to. I've been bluffing that point ever since you and I met again. It's been torture to have to do it—damned, humiliating torture; but it's been difficult to do anything else. You see, I couldn't even speak of it without seeming to—to insult you—that is, unless you took me in just the right way."