"I say you're not sorry. You're glad. You're glad, just like anybody else might be. I don't blame you."
She shot these words at him like bullets, with a disturbing display of passionate resentment. He opened his lips to speak, and thinking better of it, or else not thinking at all in his astonishment, gaped witlessly, wholly incapable of conceiving what had got into the girl.
With a flush of scornful satisfaction her eyes remarked these evidences, so easily to be misinterpreted; then quickly she lowered her head and turned away, leaning against the table, her back to the light and face in shadow.
"I don't blame you," she repeated in a sullen murmur.
He demanded blankly: "My dear girl, what do you mean?"
"I mean.... Why, just that you're glad to get rid of me!" she returned, looking away. He noticed the nervous strength with which her hands closed over the edge of the table, the whitening of their small knuckles.... "It's perfectly natural, I guess. I've been a nuisance so long, you've got every right to be tired of having me hang around—"
"But, my dear young woman—!"
She interrupted impatiently: "Oh, don't call me that. It don't mean anything. I guess I know when I'm not wanted. I'll go now and never bother you any more."
Moving a pace or two away, she resumed before Matthias could muster faculties to cope with this emergency:
"All the same, I don't want you to think I don't appreciate how good you've been to me—and patient, and all that. I am grateful—honest'—but I'm not as dumb as you think: I know when I'm in the way, all right!"