"Damn it," he exclaimed, "can't you talk of this like a man! Don't you care enough for Marcia to think a little of her happiness? I want you to let her go—to let her believe, whether it is the truth or not, that she is not, as she seems to think, necessary to your life. Come! Life has its sacrifices as well as its compensations. You've had the best part of a wonderful woman's life. I am not saying a word about the conditions which exist between you. I don't presume. If I did, I should have to remember that Marcia speaks always of your treatment of her with tears of gratitude in her eyes. But your time has come. Marcia has many years to live. There is something grown up within her which you have nothing to do with—a little flame of genius which burns there all the time, which at this very moment would be a furnace but for the fact of the unnatural life she is forced to lead as your—companion. Now you ask what I've come for, and you know. I want you to forget yourself and to think of the woman who has been your faithful and sympathetic companion for all these years. She hasn't come to her own yet. She can't with you. She can with me. Write and thank her for what she has given you, and tell her that for the future she is free. She can make her choice then, unfettered by these infernal bonds which you have laid around her."
The Marquis turned the lamp a little lower with steady fingers. The necessity for his action was not altogether apparent.
"You suggest, Mr. Borden, if I understand you rightly," he said, "that I am now too old and too unintelligent to afford Marcia the stimulating companionship which her gifts deserve?"
"There can't be a great sympathy between you," the other declared, "and, to be brutal, the place in life which she deserves, and to which she aspires, is not open to her under present conditions."
"You allude, I presume," the Marquis said, "to the absence of any legal tie between Miss Hannaway and myself?"
"I do," Borden assented. "The world is a broad-minded place enough, but there are differences and backwaters—I am not here to explain them to you. I don't need to. Marcia Hannaway, married to her publisher, going where she will, thinking how she will, meeting whom she will, would be a different person to Miss Marcia Hannaway, living in isolation in Battersea, with nothing warm nor human in her life except—"
"Precisely," the Marquis interrupted, with a little gesture which might have concealed—anything. "I am beginning to grasp your point of view, Mr. Borden."
"And your answer?"
"I have no answer to give you, sir. You have made certain suggestions, which I may or may not be prepared to accept. In any case, matters of so much importance scarcely lend themselves to decisions between strangers. I shall probably allude to what you have said when I see or write Miss Hannaway."
"You've nothing more to say to me about it, then?" Borden persisted, a little wistfully.