"I had not the slightest suspicion of these--these manipulations on my father's part," continued Arthur, "for my habit is in no way to interfere with his business concerns. He said to me one day, that if I chose to sue for the hand of Baron Windeg's daughter, my proposal would be accepted. I agreed to the plan, and I was formally presented to you, our betrothal following a few days later. That is my share of the business."
Eugénie turned away.
"I would rather have had a plain avowal of your complicity than this fable," she said coldly.
Again the man's eyes opened wide, and again that strange light gleamed in them, ready to kindle into flame, but ever anew quenched by the ashes.
"It seems I stand so high in my wife's estimation, that my words do not even find credence with her?" said he, this time with a decided touch of bitterness.
Eugénie's fair face expressed the most sovereign contempt, as she turned it towards her husband, and she answered slightingly:
"You really must excuse me, Arthur, for not meeting you in a spirit of perfect confidence. Until the day you entered our house for the first time on an errand I understood but too well--until then, I had known you only through the city gossip, and it"----
"Drew no flattering portrait of me? That I can well believe. Will you not have the goodness to tell me what people were pleased to say of me in town?"
She raised her large eyes and looked him steadily in the face.
"People said that Arthur Berkow only made so princely a display, only threw away thousands upon thousands, in order to buy the favour of the young nobility and the right to associate with them, hoping that his own humble birth would thus be forgotten. People said that in the wild, dissipated doings of a certain set, he was the wildest, the most dissipated of all. As to some of the other reports, it would ill become me as a woman to pronounce upon them."