"I will! You are my wife, and I am your husband, and I think it is your duty to live with me."
She looks at him for a long time, as if thinking.
"I'll tell you what you think," says she slowly, "that it will add to your respectability in the eyes of your world to have your wife living in your house, and not in Margaret's."
"I don't expect to be generously judged by you," says he. "But even as you put it there is sense in it. If our world——"
"Yours! yours!" interrupts she angrily—that old wound had always rankled. "It is not my world! I have nothing to do with it. I do not belong to it. Your mother showed me that, even so long ago as when we were first"—there is a little perceptible hesitation—"married".
"Hang my mother!" says Rylton violently. "I tell you my world is your world, and if not—well, then I have no desire to belong to it. The question is, Tita, will you consent to forget—and—and forgive—and"—with a sudden plunge—"make it up with me?"
He would have taken her hand here, but she slips adroitly behind a small table.
"Say it is for respectability's sake, if you like, that I ask you to return to me," goes on Rylton, a little daunted, however, by her determined entrenchment; "though it is not. Still——"
She stops him.
"It is no use," says she. "Don't go on. I cannot. I will not. I," her lips quiver slightly—"I was too unhappy with you. And I should always think of——" Her voice dies away.