“I am in rather a desperate one if that is anything,” she said, looking at him with something of the old light in her tired eyes.
“You made a little error, perhaps, in those calculations?” he suggested. “It can be amended.”
“Don’t be a brute,” she answered fiercely.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“That sounds a little severe,” he remarked.
“Don’t take any notice of anything I say tonight,” she murmured softly. “I am a little mad. I think that everything is going against me! I know that you haven’t a grain of sympathy for me—that you would rather see me suffer than not, and yet you see I give myself away entirely. Why shouldn’t I? Part of it is through you in a way.”
“I rather fancied,” he remarked, “that up to now—”
“Yes! Of course!” she interrupted, “you saved me from ruin, staved it off at any rate. And you held over the reckoning! I—I almost wish—”
She paused. Again her eyes were searching his.
“I am a little tired of it all, you see,” she continued. “I don’t suppose Lumley and I can ever be the same again since I brought him—that check. He avoids being alone with me—I do the same with him. One would think—to watch the people, that the whole transaction was in the Morning Post. They smile when they see us together, they grin when they see you with anybody else. It’s getting hateful, Wingrave!”