He had the satisfaction of seeing her color rise. The sight sent a thrill of hope through him. He moved nearer to her and said in a voice that vibrated with feeling:
“You loved me once.”
“No, never, never. It was never that.”
“Then why,” he answered, his lips trying to twist themselves into a sardonic smile, while rage possessed him, “why did you—let us say—encourage me so that night in the cottage on Pine Street?”
Though her color burned deeper, her eyes did not drop. He had never seen her dominating her own girlish impulses like this. It seemed to remove her thousands of miles from the circle of his power.
“I’ll tell you,” she answered; “I was lonely and miserable, and you seemed the only creature that I had to care for. I thought you were fond of me, and I thought it was wonderful that any one as clever as you could really care for me. That you regarded me as you did I could no more have imagined than I could have suspected you of picking my pocket or murdering me. And that night in the cottage, when in my loneliness and distress I seemed to be holding out my arms to you, asking you to protect and comfort me, you laughed at me and struck me a blow in the face. It was the end of my dream. I wakened then and saw the reality. But you—you as you are—as I know you now—I never loved, I never could have loved.”
Her words inflamed his rage, not alone against her, but against himself, who had had her in this pliant mood in his very arms and had lost her.
“And was it only a desire for consolation and sympathy that made you behave toward me in what was hardly—a—” he paused as if hesitating for a word that would in a seemly manner express his thought, in reality racking his brains for the one that would hurt her most—“hardly a maidenly way considering your lack of interest in me?”
The word he had chosen told. Her color sank suddenly away, leaving her very pale. Her face seemed to stiffen and lose its youthful curves.
“I don’t think,” she said slowly, “that it’s necessary to continue this conversation. It doesn’t seem to me to be very profitable to anybody.”