“No.”
“Then, what have you come for?”
He knew now—at least partly. During the moment he had been in the room and had gazed upon her, there had emerged from the maze of his thoughts and feelings, a sharply defined repugnance to what within the next hour or two was to happen between her and Loveman: a repugnance, felt in her behalf, that she should be made to yield to whatever influences that cunning little lawyer would be able to exert.
“I have come to ask you,” he said, trying to speak composedly, but with all his being vibrant beneath that composure, “to break off this affair with Jack Morton of your own free will. You know you don’t care for him. You know what you are planning to do isn’t square. Why don’t you be true to the best self that is in you and end it all yourself?—and end it now? There’s the telephone,” he urged—remembering that Loveman might any moment appear—“call Jack Morton up and tell him you’ve decided not to do it!”
As he spoke, her face had grown sharp with decision. “Mr. Clifford,” she exclaimed in a low, cutting voice, “I’m tired of your presumption, your interference! I’m tired of your trying to make me be what you think I ought to be! As if it mattered to me what you thought!”
She took a step nearer, her straight, young figure stiffened, and her dark eyes flashed at him. “Understand this, Mr. Clifford,—I’ve made up my mind, and made it up definitely, finally. I am going to do exactly what I want to do, and it is not in your power to stop me or divert me. You may tell either of the Mortons if you like—my real course will not be changed—that will merely mean that I’ll do what I want to do in some other way!”
Clifford did not attempt to answer. Her defiant words, her young figure so rigid with its determined spirit of worldliness, had set some strange force working in him; a vague power seemed to be at conflict with the purpose he had held to for so long; a strange revulsion seized him, a revolution was under way which was compelling in its sweeping drive, but whose intent and direction for a moment he could not perceive.
He stood still, and stared at her. And then out of the inner turmoil came a clear, bright order; and then he realized that the restlessness, the formless doubts of the night before, had been the first faint stirrings of this which was grown and clarified into a new purpose and a new vision—a purpose and vision that astonished him. For they had come at the very time when his old purpose was the same as achieved.
She could but notice the remarkable change in his appearance. “Well, what is it now?” she demanded.
He drew a deep, quivering breath. A recklessness, a defiance—but behind which his new purpose remained cool—now possessed him. He was aware that he had to act quickly, for any instant Peter Loveman might be here.