"That was not the reason you gave," he said at length.
"It's the true reason."
"Then the other was a lie? Jim thought it might be, but I said I knew you too well for that. Then you've been lying to me all along? You never intended to marry me?"
"No."
The hateful charge was used as a dispassionate definition. Jack refused to grow angry, and Barbara felt her resistance wearing itself out against him.
"Jack——"
He enjoined silence with the slightest movement of one hand and reflected unhurriedly.
"You always said that money didn't weigh with you.... I gave you every chance of slipping in a friendly warning.... Why did you do this, Barbara? If you never meant to marry me, why did you deliberately——"
While he continued to speak with frozen self-restraint, she felt that she could not bear the end of his sentence.
"How was I to know?" she interrupted; and there was a note of sincerity in her voice, for she had never imagined that he loved her to the point of perjuring himself. "You say you gave me a chance of warning you.... How was I to know? Up to the end—that night at Ross House—you were abusing me and finding fault with me. You dared to tell me you'd said nothing that my father hadn't said a hundred times! If you thought you'd changed me.... You must have been mad; I let you abuse me because it wasn't worth arguing about, I knew I was right, I've proved I was right.... I know I haven't changed you and I never shall. You always despised me so much, you said I was vulgar, shallow, vain, heartless.... Did you expect me to understand that that was your way of shewing that you were in love with me?"