“Ah, wait!” He flung himself between her and the door. “We must understand each other, Miss Armytage.”
“I think we do, Captain Tremayne,” she answered, fire dancing in her eyes. And she added: “You are detaining me.”
“Intentionally.” He was calm again; and he was masterful for the first time in all his dealings with her. “We are very far from any understanding. Indeed, we are overhead in a misunderstanding already. You misconstrue my words. I am very angry with you. I do not think that in all my life I have ever been so angry with anybody. But you are not to mistake the source of my anger. I am angry with you for the great wrong you have done yourself.”
“That should not be your affair,” she answered him, thus flinging back the offending phrase.
“But it is. I make it mine,” he insisted.
“Then I do not give you the right. Please let me pass.” She looked him steadily in the face, and her voice was calm to coldness. Only the heave of her bosom betrayed the agitation under which she was labouring.
“Whether you give me the right or not, I intend to take it,” he insisted.
“You are very rude,” she reproved him.
He laughed. “Even at the risk of being rude, then. I must make myself clear to you. I would suffer anything sooner than leave you under any misapprehension of the grounds upon which I should have preferred to face a firing party rather than have been rescued at the sacrifice of your good name.”
“I hope,” she said, with faint but cutting irony, “you do not intend to offer me the reparation of marriage.”