"Personally I have not thought about you," she answered. "Apart from that, I hate you. You represent the victor, and all that I have loved upon this earth have been the vanquished. Willingly I would not give you so much as the touch of my fingers. If I thought that my presence was a pleasure to you, I would shrink back into myself. If I thought that any happiness could come to you from our association, even now I would throw myself from the car and end it."
"Our prospects of matrimonial bliss," he remarked, "appear to me to be distinctly above the average."
"I do not expect," she answered, "to find any pleasure that may come to me in later life, at your hands."
"I shall certainly not allow you to flirt."
"I know the law," she answered. "I know what I may do and what I may not do. I shall not transgress it. I want your money, I want your position, I want your power. These things I will share with you. For the rest, you cannot keep too far away to please me."
He leaned towards her, heedless of the fact that she was shrinking away. There was something a little pitiful in the blue-gray eyes which tried so hard to hold him at a distance. "Well," said he, "it will be an interesting experiment, at any rate. Personally, I think that you are a brave woman. I wonder that you did not take the money without me."
"What good would that have been to me?" she answered. "I have no name, no friends. Can't you imagine the sort of people who would have come hanging on to my skirts, if I had made my début on the scene as a widow or a spinster with a large fortune, unattached, looking for companions? No! I need your name, Mr. Stirling Deane."
"I am not at all sure," he answered grimly, "that you will find that much of an asset."
"You must see to it that I do find it an asset, and a valuable one," she answered. "You are relieved now from any fear of that deed being produced. There is no shadow of evidence to connect you with the man Sinclair, or with my brother's transaction with him. If your lawyers are clever and you are brave, you must win your case with honor, and Hefferom will be sent to prison. He deserves it, in any case."
Deane nodded. "I shall win my case all right," he said. "For me there never was any danger except in the production of that document, concerning which you have been so mysterious."