“What? You think that I—”
“No, don’t touch me. I don’t believe that you have told me the truth.”
“Not believe—that I—!”
“No, God help me, I cannot!”
Her body had hardly changed the pose that it had taken from the first moment. It was as though it had stiffened with the slow, pitiless hardening of her heart. Parker Steel looked at her like the moral coward that he was, too crushed by his own keen consciousness of shame to pretend to the courage that he could not boast.
“Betty, am I—?”
She flung aside from him with an indescribable gesture of passionate repulsion.
“Don’t. I can’t look at you, or be looked at. Madge is waiting for me. They will bring you your dinner. Good-night.”
She moved towards the door.
“Betty—”