"Don't tease, if you please, Mr. Langton," he retorts, with immense dignity. "Jealousy only exists with love, you know. And I haven't pretended to fall in love with my wife yet!"
With this most ungenerous stab, he flies out of the room in a passion.
The rosy-lipped shells fall unheeded from Reine's lap to the floor as she rises and stands before her uncle, the bitter tears of shame crowding into her eyes.
"Oh, Uncle Langton, how could you—how could you?" she cries, in bitter distress. "It—it is too—too absurd. He never could, you know——"
"There—there, don't cry, dear," he soothes, gently. "I am an old bungler, I know, and I shouldn't have said it so plain, but the fact remains. Vane Charteris, whether he knows it or not, is falling in love with you, my dear, and is correspondingly jealous of the baronet's attentions to you."
The beautiful dark eyes looked at him incredulously. She shakes her head.
"You are mistaken," she answers, decidedly. "Your hopes mislead you. Confess now," smiling pensively through her tears, "that 'the wish was father to the thought.'"
"Perhaps so," he answers, willing to drop the subject and sorry he had agitated it.
Vane goes home rather ruefully, without breakfasting with Mr. Langton, as he had promised himself.