ce, which was not
the least element in Escobar's humiliation. "I am very sorry. I tried
not to hurt you. I am very ignorant, as you have told me, but I wouldn't
believe it till a week ago. I made it my pride to be different from
anybody else. I believed that I was different. I was a fool. I wouldn't
listen. Even during the war. I have shut myself up away from it, trying
not to share in the effort, not to feel the pride and the sorrow,
pretending that it was just a horrible, sordid business altogether
beneath lofty minds! That's one of the reasons why I chose you for my
friend! I was flinging my glove in the face of the little world I knew.
I had _got_ to be different. It's all very shameful to tell, and I am
sorry. Oh, how I am sorry!"

Her sorrow was most evident. She had sunk down upon a couch, her fair
head drooping and the tears now running down her cheeks in the
bitterness of her shame. But Mario Escobar was untouched by any pity. If
any thought occurred to him outside his burning humiliation, it was
prompted by the economy of the Spaniard.

"She'll spoil that frock if she goes on crying," he said to himself,
"and it was very expensive."

"I have nothing but remorse to offer in atonement," she went on. "But
that remorse is very sincere----"

Mario Escobar swept her plea aside with a furious gesture.

"So that's it!" he cried. "You were just making a fool of me!" That she,
this pretty pink and white girl, should have been making a show of him,
parading him before her friends, exhibiting him, using him as a
challenge--just as in fact he had been using her, and with more success!
Only to think of it hurt him like a knife. "Your remorse!" he cried
scornfully. "There's some one else, of course!"

Joan sat up straight and stiff. Escobar might have laid a lash across
her delicate shoulders.

"Yes," she said defiantly.

"Some one who was not here a week ago?"

"Yes."

To Escobar's humiliation was now added a sudden fire of jealousy. For
the first time to-night, as woman, as flesh and blood, she was adorable,
and she owed this transformation, not to him, no, not in the tiniest
fraction of a degree to him, but to some one else, some dull boor
without niceties or deftness, who had stormed into her life within the
week. Who was it? He had got to know. But Joan was hardly thinking of
Escobar. Her eyes were turned from him.

"He has set me free from many vanities and follies. If I am grieved and
ashamed now, I owe