"I don't know why you should have been so unkind.
I have heard nothing of you for weeks, do you know, excepting through Potowski. It wasn't kind, was it?"
"I was rude and ungrateful, but I could not do otherwise."
She bent forward to him as he sat on the divan. "I wonder why?" she asked. "Were we not friends? Could you not have trusted me? Do you think me so narrow and conventional—so stupid?"
"Oh!" he exclaimed, and he smiled a little, thinking of Nora Scarlet. "It is not quite what you think."
He was angry with her, with the facts of their existence, with her great fortune, and her engagement to the man he despised above all others, his own incognito and the fact that she had sent Cedersholm to buy his study, and that he could not express to her, without insult, his feelings or tell her frankly who he was.
"You were not kind, Mr. Rainsford."
He reflected that she thought him the lover of a Latin Quarter student, if she thought at all, which she probably did not. Without humility he confessed—
"Yes, I have been very rude indeed." He wiped his clay-covered hands slowly, each finger separately, his eyes bent. He rose abruptly. "Would you care to look at a study I am making for Barye?" He drew off the cloths from the clay he was engaged in modelling. She only glanced at the group and he asked her, almost roughly: "Why did you buy by proxy my little study in the exhibition? Why did you ask Cedersholm to do so?"
Mrs. Faversham looked at him in frank surprise. "Your study in the exhibition? I knew nothing of it. I did not know you had exhibited. I have been ill for a fortnight, and have not seen a paper or heard a hit of news."