His smile became a scowl—the anger scowl of the Gordons.
"Why shouldn't I?" he demanded. "What have I done to make every woman I meet look at me as if I were a leper?"
She rose from the piano-stool and confronted him bravely. It was now or never, if their future attitude each to the other was to be succinctly defined.
"You know very well what you have done," she said evenly. "If you had a spark of manhood left in you, you would know what a dastardly thing you are doing now in coming here to see me."
"Well, I don't," he returned doggedly. "And another thing: I'm not to be put off with hard words. I ask you again what has happened? Who has been lying about me this time?"
Three other guests of the hotel were entering the music-room and the quarrel had to pause. Ardea had a nerve-shaking conviction that it would never do to leave it in the air. He must be made to understand, once for all, that he had sinned beyond forgiveness. She caught up the light wrap she had been wearing earlier in the evening and turned to one of the windows opening on the rear veranda. "Come with me," she whispered; and he followed obediently.
But there was no privacy to be had out of doors. There was a goodly scattering of people in the veranda chairs enjoying the perfect night and the white moonlight. Ardea stopped suddenly.
"You were intending to walk down to the valley?" she asked.
He nodded.
"I will walk with you to the cliff edge."