“Insulting! What on earth do you mean by that?” coaxingly. “Please tell me why you are going?”
“Because I don’t want ever to see you or speak to you again,” she said in a voice shaken with anger. “I couldn’t have believed any man could be so lacking in decency as—as—to do this.”
“Do what?” he asked with an air of blank surprise. “What am I doing?”
“Thrusting yourself on me this way when—when—you know that the sight of you is humiliating and hateful to me.”
“Oh, Mariposa!” he said softly. He looked into her face with eyes brimming with teasing tenderness. “How can you say that to me when my greatest fault has been to love you?”
“Love me!” she ejaculated with breathless scorn; “love me! Oh, Benito,”—calling with all her force—“come; do come. I want you!”
Benito, who undoubtedly must have heard, was too pleasantly engaged with the companionship of his new friend to make any response. Early in life he had learned the value of an occasional attack of deafness.
Mariposa made a motion to go to him, but Essex gently moved in front of her. She drew away from him, knitting her brows in helpless, heated rage.
“You know you’re treating me very badly,” he said.
“Treating you very badly,” she now fairly gasped, once more a bewildered fly in the net of this subtile spider, “how else should I treat you?”