"Well?" demands she in return, shaking her arm loose from his hold.
"You have been crying for him, no doubt—for your——" He pauses.
"My what?" asks Tita. She is looking at him with fearless, wondering eyes.
"Your cousin," says Rylton, altering the phrase that would have made it in his anger, "your lover."
"I have not been crying because of Tom," says Tita coldly, "though I am very sorry he is going. He loves me, I think."
"Do you?" says Rylton. A sarcastic smile crosses his lips "And you? Do you love him? No doubt cousins are charming possessions. And so I find you crying because your dear possession is going, and because, no doubt, you were confiding to him what a desperate monster a husband can be."
There is hardly anything in his life afterwards that Rylton is so ashamed of as this; even now in the heat of the terrible anger that leads him so to forget himself, he cowers before the girl's eyes.
"Is that what people do in your set?" says she coldly—icily. "In the charmed circle within which your mother tells me I am not fit to enter? If so, I am glad I do not belong to it. Set your mind at ease, Maurice. I have not told Tom anything about you. I have not even told him what a——" She pauses. A flash from her eyes enters his. "I have told him nothing—nothing," says she, running past him into the house.