"Must n't!"
"Miss Wellington, I know, it is none of my business. And yet—Don't you know," he added fiercely, "what a girl you are? I know. I have seen! You are radiant, Miss Wellington, in spirit as in face. Any man knowing what Koltsoff is, who could sit back and let you waste yourself on him would be a pup. Thornton, of the Jefferson, has his record. Write to Walker, attaché at St. Petersburg, or Cook at Paris, or Miller at London—they will tell you. Why, even in Newport—"
Jack paused in his headlong outburst and then continued more deliberately.
"It is not for me to indict the man. I could not help speaking because you are you. I cannot do any more than warn you. If I transgress, if I am merely a blundering fool—if you are not what I take you for—forget what I have said. Send me away when we return."
She had been listening to him, as in a daze. Now she shook her head.
"I shall not do that," she said. "Did you take employment with us to say what you have said to me?"
"No."
She hesitated a moment.
"I suppose all men of Koltsoff's sort are the same," she said musingly. "I am not quite so innocent as that. We are wont to accept our European noblemen as husbands with no question as to the wild oats, immediately behind them—or without considering too closely the wild oats that are to be strewn—afterwards. Ah, don't start; that is the way we expatriates are educated—no, not that; but these are the lessons we absorb. And so—" she was looking at Armitage with a hard face, "so the things that impressed you so terribly—I appreciate and thank you for your motives in speaking of them—do not appear so awful to me."
Jack, his clean mind in a whirl, was looking at her aghast.