"Because if I'd taken her at her word, I shouldn't have been playing fair."
At the recurrence of that phrase "playing fair," a momentary annoyance crept into Braithwaite's eyes. "I've always heard," he commenced, "that in love and war——"
"Everything's fair," Tabs ended his quotation. "Well, in this case, it isn't. It was because she realized, after she'd promised herself to you, that in love everything isn't fair, that she asked me to get her promise back."
"You mean as regards yourself? She'd begun to feel that she wasn't treating you handsomely?"
"I don't mean as regards myself. You were the cause of her change of mind."
"I!" Braithwaite's bewilderment made him hostile. "How could I have caused her to change her mind? I parted with her after midnight; it must have been shortly after nine that she was seeing you. I held no communication with her in any shape or form during the eight or nine hours that elapsed."
"Nevertheless, you were the cause. She realized in the meanwhile that in love everything isn't fair. It isn't fair to ignore a young girl's happiness in order to win her hand. You had done that; though she has no proofs, instinctively she feels it."
Braithwaite shook his head and thrust himself back with the gesture of a man whose patience is completely at an end. "I haven't the vaguest idea what you're hinting at."
"Then I'll be brutally explicit. You've at no time told her who you were or where you came from before you made a name for yourself. You've evaded all her questions. You told a palpable falsehood in her presence when you insisted that you had never known me. You're perfectly aware that, if you approached her father, all the facts about your past, which you're suppressing, would most certainly come out. Your courting has been clandestine, behind the back of her family. It seems perfectly obvious that you're trying to lure her into a runaway match. She has grounds for believing that you do not trust her and, because of that, although you fascinate her,