“Use my name? I shall consent to nothing of the sort!” But as she turned to leave the room Fan caught her hand and pulled her back.
“Don't go yet, Mary dear,” she said; “we have not yet quite settled what to do.”
The other looked at her, a little frown on her forehead, a half-smile on her lips.
“Very well, Fan, hear my last word, then take your own course. I quite understand your wheedling ways, and I have so often given way that you have come to think you can do just what you like with me. You have yet to learn that when my mind is once made up about anything you might just as well attempt to move the Monument as to move me. You shall not couple my name with yours; and if you are going to ask Captain Horton down here, I advise you, to prevent mistakes, to inform him that I distinctly refuse to join you in the invitation.”
Fan, without replying, sat down before her writing-case. The other paused at the door, and after hesitating a few moments came back and put her hands on the girl's shoulder.
“I know exactly what you are going to do, Fan,” she spoke, “for you are perfectly transparent, and I can read you like a book. You are going to write one of your very simple candid letters to tell him what I have said, and then finish by asking him to come down with Mr. Eden.”
“Yes, that is what I am going to do.”
“Then, my dear girl, I should like to ask you a simple straightforward question: What is your motive in acting in this way?”
“My motive, Mary! Just now you said you could read me like a book; must I begin to think that you boast a little too much—or are you only pretending to be ignorant?”
“You grow impertinent, Miss Eden,” said the other with a laugh. “But if your motive is what I imagine, then, thank goodness, your efforts are wasted. Listen to this. If, instead of being a young innocent girl, you were an ancient, shrivelled-up, worldly-minded woman, with a dried-up puff-ball full of blue dust for a heart, and a scheming brain manufactured by Maskelyne and Cook; and if you had Captain Horton for a son, and had singled me out for his victim, you could not have done more to put me in his power.”