"You would like this for her?" said Leonora, with ominous calmness.
"Yes; will you part with it?—for money, if you will. It is singularly perfect, and should be worth something considerable."
"You are very kind," said Leonora.
She had pulled a flower from a grave, and was tearing its petals apart with fierce cruelty between her white fingers.
"No; I am only just," he said; then, with a smile. "Ah! Miss West, do not be so cruel to that poor flower. I have a shuddering conviction that it is, metaphorically, myself you are deliberately annihilating."
She glanced up to him rather curiously from beneath her shady lashes.
"I—did not really think what I was doing," she said. "Why should you think I would treat you that way?"
"Because I have been so unfortunate as to incur your dislike," he answered.
She did not utter the denial he half hoped she would, but she threw her mutilated flower from her with a quickly suppressed sigh.