If Guy Oscard was no great adept at wordy warfare, he was at all events strong in his reception of punishment. He stood upright and quiescent, betraying by neither sign nor movement that her words could hurt him.
“I beg to suggest again,” said Jack composedly, “that Oscard has not yet brought any accusations against you. You have brought them all yourself.”
“You are both cruel and cowardly,” she exclaimed, suddenly descending to vituperation. “Two to one. Two men—GENTLEMEN—against one defenceless girl. Of course I am not able to argue with you. Of course you can get the best of me. It is so easy to be sarcastic.”
“I do not imagine,” retorted Jack, “that anything that we can say or do will have much permanent power of hurting you. For the last two years you have been engaged in an—intrigue, such as a thin-skinned or sensitive person would hardly of her own free will undertake. You may be able to explain it to yourself—no doubt you are—but to our more limited comprehensions it must remain inexplicable. We can only judge from appearances.”
“And of course appearances go against me—they always do against a woman,” she cried rather brokenly.
“You would have been wise to have taken that peculiarity into consideration sooner,” replied Jack Meredith coldly. “I admit that I am puzzled; I cannot quite get at your motive. Presumably it is one of those—SWEET feminine inconsistencies which are so charming in books.”
There was a little pause. Jack Meredith waited politely to hear if she had anything further to say. His clean-cut face was quite pallid; the suppressed anger in his eyes was perhaps more difficult to meet than open fury. The man who never forgets himself before a woman is likely to be an absolute master of women.
“I think,” he added, “that there is nothing more to be said.”
There was a dead silence. Millicent Chyne glanced towards Guy Oscard. He could have saved her yet—by a simple lie. Had he been an impossibly magnanimous man, such as one meets in books only, he could have explained that the mistake was all his, that she was quite right, that his own vanity had blinded him into a great and unwarranted presumption. But, unfortunately, he was only a human being—a man who was ready to give as full a measure as he exacted. The unfortunate mistake to which he clung was that the same sense of justice, the same code of honour, must serve for men and women alike. So Millicent Chyne looked in vain for that indulgence which is so inconsistently offered to women, merely because they are women—the indulgence which is sometimes given and sometimes withheld, according to the softness of the masculine heart and the beauty of the suppliant feminine form. Guy Oscard was quite sure of his own impressions. This girl had allowed him to begin loving her, had encouraged him to go on, had led him to believe that his love was returned. And in his simple ignorance of the world he did not see why these matters should be locked up in his own breast from a mistaken sense of chivalry to be accorded where no chivalry was due.
“No,” he answered. “There is nothing more to be said.”