"What?"
"You did. You know you did. Oh, what perfidy! Only a moment since you declared it openly, shamelessly; and now you deny it! Why I wouldn't have believed it, even of you. How can you pretend to forget it?"
But that there are tears born of real emotion in her great eyes, Mr. Desmond would assuredly believe she is making a vast joke at his expense, so innocent is he of any offence.
"If by some unfortunate method," he says, calmly, "you have metamorphosed any speech of mine into a declaration relative to a flirtation with Mrs. Bohun, you have done an uncommonly clever thing. You have turned a lie into truth. I never said even one spoony word to Olga Bohun in all my life."
"Then why," in a still much-aggrieved tone, but with strong symptoms of relenting, "did you say you were?"
"I don't remember saying it at all," says poor Mr. Desmond, who has forgotten all about his interrupted remark.
"Then what were you saying to Olga just as I came in?"
"Oh! that!"—brightening into a remembrance of the past by the greatest good luck, or the quarrel might have proved a final one (which would have been a sad pity, as so many right good ones followed it). "You stopped me just now when I was going to tell you about it. When you came this evening I was dancing with Olga, and talking to her of you. It was some small consolation."
"But you were smiling at her," says Monica, faltering, "and whispering to her—whispering!"
"Of you. You believe me? Monica, look at me. Do you know I really think that——"