“It looks like a drop of blood.” She shivered slightly. “Champagne doesn’t stain.” Her mouth laughed, but her eyes were full of a dull despair. “When we are married we shall both be drinking that! Do you remember that foolish little song I used to sing, ‘When we are married’?” She tried to hum it, but failed miserably. “We shall sing our songs with a difference, now. Oh, Boy, Boy, it has all been my fault, hasn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, tensely.
“Oh, everything,” she said, wearily. “The worldliness and the wretchedness, and now it is too late! ‘Couldst thou not watch with me?’ Boy, I’m afraid I’m going to cry.” Her lip quivered pitifully.
“Nance, do you care?”
“Care? Of course I care!” She threw her head back defiantly, and her eyes filled with angry tears. “If I hadn’t, I shouldn’t be here to-night. I—I’d have been married two months ago. God knows I wish I had, before—before all this happened!”
“Then listen to me, Nance.” Philip spoke very quietly, but his eyes burned into her soul. “There isn’t any other woman, there never has been, there never could be. I love you, and love you only, with my whole soul, my whole strength——”
“But you said——” began Nancy, in a weak little voice.
“Never mind what I said,” he answered, almost roughly. “I’d sworn I’d never trouble you again without some sign from you. Yet the instant I saw you, out there on the sidewalk, it was all I could do to keep from kneeling down and kissing your blessed little shoes. But I wouldn’t have done it for fifteen thousand different worlds. Suddenly, when you were talking about that damnable man”—Phil ground his teeth savagely—“and his ‘shoals of money,’ that other idea occurred to me—a last resort, a final, forlorn hope that if you had a spark of feeling left for me you might show it then, and I made it all up out of whole cloth.”
“Philip, you’re a brute!” The tears were falling now, but the wraith of a smile hovered about the corners of Nancy’s mouth.
“I know I am. I’m despicable, mean, cowardly, unmanly——”