"That you thought me rather pretty—yes," she replied, modestly. "I knew also that I was a mésalliance for you, and that Captain Lancaster's future was 'cut and dried,'" bitterly.
He gazed at her in wonder.
"And you have kept it to yourself all this while, Miss West?"
"Yes, because I was ashamed to confess the truth. I did not want to be thought an eavesdropper, for I did not really wish to hear. It was an accident, but it has weighed on my mind ever since, and at last I made up my mind to 'fess, as the children say."
He gazed at her with ever-increasing admiration.
"So," she went on, slowly, "this evening I told Captain Lancaster all about it."
She blushed at the remembrance of some other things she had told him—things she had not meant to tell, but which had slipped out, as it were, in her compunction at her rudeness to him.
"And—that was all? Was he not making love to you, really?" cried the lieutenant, still uneasy at the remembrance of that impulsive hand-clasp that had so amazed him.
She flashed her great eyes at him in superb anger.
"Love to me—he would not dare!" breathlessly. "I'm nothing to him, nothing to you—never shall be! Please remember that! Once I reach my aunt, neither of you need ever expect to see me again. I—I—" a strangling sob; she broke down and wept out her anger in a perfumed square of black-bordered cambric.