Miss Daisy and myself. I suppose you thought I had been
a bad lot--I daresay I had--and did not want me to marry her. But
wasn't that an infernally cruel way of doing it?"

Jeannie said nothing, but after a long silence she looked at him.

"Have you finished?" she asked. "I have nothing to say to you, no
explanation to give."

Once again, and more violently, his anger, his resentment at the cruelty
of it, boiled over.

"No, I have not finished," he said. "I am here to tell you that you have
done an infernally cruel thing, for I take it that it was to separate
Miss Daisy and me that you did it. You have been completely successful,
but--but for me it has been rather expensive. I gave you my heart, I
tell you. And you stamped on it. I can't mend it."

Then that died out and his voice trembled.

"It's broken," he said--"just broken."

Jeannie put out her hands towards him in supplication.

"I am sorry," she said.

"I tell you that is no good," he said, and on the words his voice broke
again. "Oh, Jeannie, is it final? Is it really true? For Heaven's sake
tell me that you have been playing this jest, trick--what you like--on
me, to test me, to see if I really loved you. You made me love you--you
taught me what love meant. I have seen and judged the manner of my past
life, and--and I laid it all down, and I laid myself down at your feet,
so that you and love should re-make me."

Jeannie leant forward over the table, hiding her face in her hands.

"Oh, stop--for pity's sake stop," she said. "I have had a good deal to
bear. I never guessed you would love me like that; I only meant you, at
first, to be attracted by me, as you have been by other women. It is
true that I was determined that you should not marry Daisy, and I knew
that if you really got to love her nothing would stand in your way. I
had to make it impossible for you to fall in love with her. It was to
save you and her."

Jeannie felt she was losing her head; the sight of this man in his anger
and his misery confused and bewildered her. She got up suddenly.

"I don't know what I am saying," she said.

"You said it was to save her and me," he said, quietly. "To save us
from what?"

She shook her head.

"I don't know," she said. "I was talking nonsense."

"I am very sure you were not. And it is only just that I should know. By
my love for you--for I can think of nothing more sacred to me than
that--I bid you tell me. It is my right. Considering wha