"Let us go somewhere and sit down for a few minutes," he suggested. "The rooms are so hot this evening."
She assented without words, and he found a solitary couch in one of the further apartments.
"I wonder," he said, after a moment's pause, "whether I might say something to you, whether you would listen to me for a few minutes."
Berenice was absorbed in her own thoughts. She allowed him to proceed.
"For a good many years," he said, lowering his voice a little, "I have worked hard and done all I could to be successful. I wanted to have some sort of a position to offer. I am a Cabinet Minister now, and although I don't suppose we can last much longer this time, I shall have a place whenever we are in again."
The sense of what he was saying began to dawn upon her. She stopped him at once.
"Please do not say any more, Sir Leslie," she begged. "I should have given you credit for sufficient perception to have known beforehand the absolute impossibility of—of anything of the sort."
"You are still a young woman," he said, quietly. "The world expects you to marry again."
"I have no interest in what the world expects of me," she answered, "but I may tell you at once that my refusal has nothing whatever to do with the question of marriage in the abstract. You are a man of perception, Sir Leslie! It will be, I trust, sufficient if I say that I have no feelings whatever towards you which would induce me to consider the subject even for a moment."
She was unchanged, then! This time he recognized the note of finality in her tone. All the time and thought he had given to this matter were wasted. He had failed, and he knew why. He seldom permitted himself the luxury of anger, but he felt all the poison of bitter hatred stirring within him at that moment, and craving for some sort of expression. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could say. But if Mannering had been within reach then he would have struck him. He rose and walked slowly away.