"Oh, it isn't a tea-party," she was saying. "It's just us three. Doctor Grant, this is Mr. Landon. Will you have this chair?—it is really the only one which is quite safe to sit on."
Dick took the proffered chair stiffly; he was conscious of a bitter sense of disappointment, tinged with disapproval. It was, of course, different for himself, but he loathed to see the other man so much at home in this quaint little dust-laden attic where Joan lived. Her bed stood against the wall, a black counterpane of sorts thrown across it; her brush and comb, the little silver things for her dressing-table were scattered about on the top of the chest of drawers standing near. The place would have been sacred to him; but how did this other man look at it? And why had Joan asked him? Was it a deliberate attempt to shield herself from something she dreaded? or did it mean that, after all, she had only been playing with him—that the fluttered surrender of her lips had been but a flirt's last fling in the game of passion? If a man is really very much in love, as was Dick, and something occurs to make him lose his temper, it is sure to end in rapid and sometimes lasting disaster. After the first five minutes Dick made no attempt even to be polite to Landon. Rage, blind, merciless rage, and a sense of having made a damned fool of himself, throbbed in his mind as he watched Joan talking to the other man, and saw the evident familiarity which lay between them. Yet he could not get up and go away; he would not leave her, not till he had hurt her as much as she was now hurting him.
For Landon, the amusement of baiting the other man's evident misery soon palled. He was a little annoyed himself that Joan should have seen fit to drag him in as such a cat's-paw, for a very few minutes of their threesome had shown him what his part was intended to be. It meant in addition that the girl had fooled him, and that he had wasted his background of red roses. It was all very annoying and a very stupid way of spending the afternoon, for no one could imagine that there was any amusement to be got out of a bad tea in squalid surroundings—thus mercilessly but almost truthfully did he dismiss the atmosphere of Joan's attic—with a girl palpably in love with someone else. Landon rose presently with his most languid air of boredom.
"Sorry, Pierrette," he said; "must fly, but I leave my roses behind me as a memory. They are not what I should call my lucky flower." He turned to Dick, who stood up with a grim face and stern-set mouth. "Good-bye, Doctor Grant; delighted to have met you: if Pierrette feels like it, get her to tell you about our last venture into the rose world. Romantic tale, isn't it, Pierrette?" He laughed, lifting her hand to his heart very impressively. "But ours has always been a romance, hasn't it? That is why we christened each other Pierrot and Pierrette." He let go her hand and bowed gravely. Joan followed him to the door. "I'll come and see you out," she said; she had not realized until the moment came how horribly afraid she was of Dick. "You might lose your way."
"Oh no," Landon assured her; he shot one last slightly vindictive glance at Dick; "I know it by heart." Then he laughed and went from the room, shutting the door behind him.
Joan stayed where she was, a seeming weight on her lids, which prevented her lifting her eyes to look at Dick. But she was intensely conscious of him, and round her heart something had closed like a band of iron. At last, since he said nothing and made no sign, she moved forward blindly and sat down in the nearest chair.
"Aren't you ever going to speak again?" she whispered.
Her words shook Dick out of his silent self-restraint. Hot anger, passionate reproaches, fought for speech in his throat; he drove them back.
"Is this your answer to my question?" he said finally. "It would have been simpler to have put it some other way. But you may at least congratulate yourself on having succeeded. You have killed something that I had thought to be almost eternal." He drew in his breath sharply, but passion was shaking him now, it had to have its say. "I have loved you," he went on hoarsely, "ever since I first saw you. Common sense has argued against you; pride has fought to throw you out of my life; but against everything your face has lived triumphant. I don't know why God makes us feel like that for women of your stamp, why we should bring such great ideals to so poor a shrine. I am talking arrant nonsense, just raving at you, you think, and I sound rather absurd even to myself. Only—my God! you don't know what you have done—you have broken my faith in you; it was the strongest, the best thing in my life."
Joan crouched down in the chair; she seemed to be trying to get as far away from his voice as possible; she sat with her head buried in her arms.