"Nothing whatever! You may possibly consider my attitude selfish," the Marquis added, "but I find myself wholly indifferent to your interests in this matter."
"I should be able to reconcile myself even to that," was the grim reply, "if I have been able to penetrate for a single moment that accursed selfishness of yours—if I have been able to make you think, for however short a time, of Marcia's future instead of your own."
The Marquis rose without haste from his place, and rang the bell.
"You will permit me, Mr. Borden," he invited, "to offer you some refreshments?"
"Thank you, I desire nothing."
The Marquis pointed to the door, by which Gossett was standing.
"That, then, I think, concludes our interview," he said, with icy courtesy.
Mr. Borden walked the full length of the very long apartment, suffered himself to be respectfully conducted across the great hall, out on to the flags and into the motor-car which he had hired in Fakenham. It was not until he was on his way through the park that he opened his lips and found them attuned to blasphemy. At the top of the gentle slope, however, where the car was brought to a standstill while the driver opened the iron gate, he turned back and looked at Mandeleys, looked at its time-worn turrets, its mullioned windows, the Norman chapel, the ruined cloisters, the ivy-covered west wing, the beautiful Elizabethan chimneys. A strange, heterogeneous mass of architecture, yet magnificent, in its way impressive, almost inspiring. He looked at the little cottage almost at its gates, from which a thin, spiral column of smoke was ascending. Perhaps in those few seconds, and with the memory of that interview still rankling, he felt a glimmering of real understanding. Something which had always been incomprehensible to him in Marcia's story stood more or less revealed.