“I was just wondering whether I’d better not keep it to myself, after all. Mr. Carfax said you were in a bad temper, but he didn’t tell me that you were utterly impossible.”
Tregarvon’s scowl deepened.
“Impossible? Of course, I am impossible. What would you expect, in the circumstances?”
At this, she smiled up at him and said: “I’m beginning to be a little deaf now—charitably deaf.”
“I don’t need charity,” he broke out hotly. “All I need is a chance to fight for my own hand. Tell me one thing: have you promised to marry Poictiers yet?”
“Have you any right to ask me such a question as that?”
“I have; the best right in the world: you know I have.”
She met his half-angry, half-passionate gaze calmly.
“I know that you are about to make a shipwreck of your better self,” she averred. Then: “Don’t you know that there are some things that are hard for a woman to forgive—or, having forgiven them, to forget?”
“I am in no mood to split hairs with you to-day,” he grated. “You are thinking of Elizabeth: she knows already what she will have to forgive. I told her in the letter I wrote Sunday night.”