“I swear—” she began vehemently.
“Don’t,” he cut in. “I don’t believe you, and if I did, a thousand times more reason why you should have played square with me.”
She knew that she had lost, even at the moment when in her self-admiration for the tour-de-force she had invented, she had felt that success must be hers. She saw a side of the man she had never suspected, the side which no woman perceives until she is on the point of losing the man who has lived at her side, and she said to herself: “I have underrated him.”
“Louise, I told you a lie,” he said. “I wish to punish you. That is the truth. I have that in me, too.” He felt the rapid mounting of his pulse, the inner raging excitement starting up, and he checked the cruel words which were on his tongue, afraid of where an outburst of passion would fling him, saying instead: “Are you through?”
She looked at him and began to laugh.
“That is better,” he said cynically.
“I did not lie to you,” she said abruptly.
“Perhaps not entirely.”
“You won’t change, then?”
He shook his head.