Her last words were fiercely accusing. She quite glared at him a few seconds, her chest heaving pantingly.
She suddenly sprang from her sofa and dashed towards a table where a pile of photographs lay in an untidy little heap. She threw them about with angrily shaking hands until at last she caught at one and brought it back to him.
"There was some one else," she laughed shrilly. "You were in love with that creature."
It was one of the photographs of Alixe such as the Bond Street shop had shown in its windows.
She made a movement as if to throw it into the grate and he took it from her hand, saying nothing whatever.
"I'd forgotten about it until Owen Delamore reminded me only yesterday," she said. "He's a romantic thing and he heard that you had been in attendance and had been sent to their castle in Germany. He worked the thing out in his own way. He said you had chosen me because I was like her. I can see now! I was like her!"
"If you had been like her," his voice was intensely bitter, "I should have asked you to be my wife. You are as unlike her as one human being can be to another."
"But I was enough like her to make you take me up!" she cried furiously.
"I have neither taken you up nor put you down," he answered. "Be good enough never to refer to the subject again."
"I'll refer to any subject I like. If you think I shall not you are mistaken. It will be worth talking about. An Early Victorian romance is worth something in these days."