"Well?" asked the girl, whispering in her excitement.
"Because you are a lady."
He bowed to her.
"Because you are fair; because you are honest, Nelly Lebrun. Personally I think that you can win Lord Nick back with one minute of smiling. But you might not. You might alienate him forever. It will be clumsy to explain to him that you were influenced not by me, but by justice. He will make it a personal matter, whereas you and I know that it is only the right that you are seeing."
She propped her chin on the tips of her fingers, and her arm was a thing of grace. For the last moments that clouded expression had not cleared.
"If I only could read your mind," she murmured now. "There is something behind it all."
"I shall tell you what it is. It is the restraint that has fallen upon me. It is because I wish to lean closer to you across the table and speak to you of things which are at the other end of the world from Landis and the other girl. It is because I have to keep my hands gripped hard to control myself. Because, though I have given up hope, I would follow a forlorn chance, a lost cause, and tell you again and again that I love you, Nelly Lebrun!"
He had half lowered his eyes as he spoke; he had called up a vision, and the face of Lou Macon hovered dimly between him and Nelly Lebrun. If all that he spoke was a lie, let him be forgiven for it; it was the golden-haired girl whom he addressed, and it was she who gave the tremor and the fiber to his voice. And after all was he not pleading for her happiness as he believed?
He covered his eyes with his hand; but when he looked up again she could see the shadow of the pain which was slowly passing. She had never seen such emotion in any man's face, and if it was for another, how could she guess it? Her blood was singing in her veins, and the old, old question was flying back and forth through her brain like a shuttle through a loom: Which shall it be?
She called up the picture of Lord Nick, half-broken, but still terrible, she well knew. She pitied him, but when did pity wholly rule the heart of a woman? And as for Nelly Lebrun, she had the ambition of a young Caesar; she could not fill a second place. He who loved her must stand first, and she saw Donnegan as the invincible man. She had not believed half of his explanation. No, he was shielding Lord Nick; behind that shield the truth was that the big man had quailed before the small.