“You?”
“Yes. Me! Don’t you know, in your heart, Mellville, that I wanted you crowned?”
“No, I know nothing of the kind! When a man wants a thing done, he does it with his own hand; when he does not want it done, or cares not 285 much about it, he does it with another man’s hand. Had you been anxious you would not have left it to Rube.”
“But with that wreath in my own hand, Mell, I was morally bound to put it upon another head.”
“Ah, indeed! Why?”
Jerome did not answer immediately. When he did, it was with averted eyes, and with some impatience, and not in reply to her first question at all, but her quick repetition of his own words, “Morally bound, eh?”
“Yes, Mellville. You forget I am a guest in her mother’s house.”
“I do not forget it! I remember it every hour in the whole twenty-four; but does that make it incumbent upon you to ignore me? Jerome, look me in the face. What is Clara Rutland to you?”
“Nothing!” exclaimed he, savagely, between compressed lips. “Less than nothing! A hundred times to-day I have wished her at the bottom of—”
“There! No use to send her there now. It’s too late!”