“Comparison or no comparison,” said Jack Meredith quickly, with the keenness of a good fencer who has been touched, “there can be no doubt of the fact that you were engaged to us both at the same time. You told us both to go out and make a fortune wherewith to buy—your affections. One can only presume that the highest bidder—the owner of the largest fortune—was to be the happy man. Unfortunately we became partners, and—such was the power of your fascination—we made the fortune; but we share and share alike in that. We are equal, so far as the—price is concerned. The situation is interesting and rather—amusing. It is your turn to move. We await your further instructions in considerable suspense.”
She stared at him with bloodless lips. She did not seem to understand what he was saying. At last she spoke, ignoring Guy Oscard's presence altogether.
“Considering that we are to be married to-morrow, I do not think that you should speak to me like that,” she said with a strange, concentrated eagerness.
“Pardon me, we are not going to be married to-morrow.”
Her brilliant teeth closed on her lower lip with a snap, and she stood looking at him, breathing so hard that the sound was almost a sob.
“What do you mean?” she whispered hoarsely.
He raised his shoulders in polite surprise at her dulness of comprehension.
“In the unfortunate circumstances in which you are placed,” he explained, “it seems to me that the least one can do is to offer every assistance in one's power. Please consider me hors de concours. In a word—I scratch.”
She gasped like a swimmer swimming for life. She was fighting for that which some deem dearer than life—namely, her love. For it is not only the good women who love, though these understand it best and see farther into it.
“Then you can never have cared for me,” she cried. “All that you have told me,” and her eyes flashed triumphantly across Oscard, “all that you promised and vowed was utterly false—if you turn against me at the first word of a man who was carried away by his own vanity into thinking things that he had no business to think.”