"Haven't I apologized, and won't you make some allowances? I had missed you this afternoon at Colonel Boucicault's—business detained me—and was bitterly disappointed. Passing your bungalow, I heard you playing—I was mortally tempted—and, relying on the fact that we are in India and not in stiff-necked England, I ventured to present myself at once."
"You relied on the facts that I am a dancer, that you once paid half a guinea for a stall to see me dance, that you cadged for an introduction where introductions were valueless, and that, once a woman ventures out into publicity, men of a certain type consider her fair game." She spoke quietly enough, but there was a whiteness about her distended nostrils which betrayed a rising anger. "Well, as you rightly say, we are not in England. The half-guinea stall is of no value here. My privacy is my right, and I beg of you to respect it."
He held his ground. His impulse had carried him into an impasse from which he could not possibly retreat with dignity.
"You are like royalty, Miss Fersen," he said fluently. "People whom you don't know, know you. It's the penalty of greatness. You can't be hard on us poor mortals who take the sunshine when they can get it. Besides, I have only forestalled events. Sooner or later, I should have met you——"
"I have lived in Gaya for two months," she interrupted, "and I have neither met you nor heard of you, Mr. Barclay."
She closed the piano, sighing impatiently. Had she looked at him at that moment she might have repented her only half-intended cruelty, for his insolent ease had become a desperate and rather pitiable humiliation. He had committed a blunder which he had neither the art nor the social adroitness to cover over, and he looked to her to make his escape possible—decent. And she ignored him. Whereat what little self-possession he owned deserted him, leaving him to the mad guidance of a raw and quivering pride.
"You know very well who and what I am, Miss Fersen," he stammered, "or you wouldn't behave like this. If I'd been one of the others, you'd have welcomed me. You wouldn't have dared treat the merest subaltern as you've treated me. If Rajah Rasaldû, a full-blown native, from whom you accept——"
She turned like a flash.
"Will you go, Mr. Barclay?" she said, scarcely above her breath.
He remained stubbornly unmoved. A minute before, he had been merely a tragi-comic figure, a victim of a midsummer night's ambition, and his own intoxicated senses. He might, to himself at least, have pleaded many things in extenuation—certainly a fundamental harmlessness and even a rather painful humility. Now he had become dangerous.