ooked at it, opened it, then moving to a window she raised the sash
and threw the card case into the night, yet so quickly and
unexpectedly that Loftus had no time to interfere.

"That is an agreeable way of getting rid of twelve thousand dollars,"
he remarked.

Yet, however lightly he affected to speak, the action annoyed him.
Like all men of large means he was close. It seemed to him beastly to
lose such a sum. He got up, went to the window and looked down. He
could not see the case and he much wanted to go and look for it. But
that for the moment Marie prevented.

"If it were twelve times twelve million," she exclaimed, "I would do
the same! Oh, Royal," she cried, "don't you know it is not your money
I want; don't you know it is you?"

Loftus did know, but he did not care. The flinging away of the money
was all he could think of. It was an act which he could not properly
qualify as plebeian, but which seemed to him crazily courtesanesque.
He returned to the table and picked up his hat. "I am going," he
announced.

Marie sprang at him. "Is that your answer?"

He brushed her aside. She saw that he was going, saw too, or thought
she saw, that he was going never to return, saw also that now at last
she was at the gates.

"My God!" she cried. "My God!"

So resonant was the cry that Loftus turned, not to her but to the
window. He closed it. But already the cry had passed elsewhere.

From regions beyond a fat negress waddled hurriedly in. Her eyes
rolled whitely from the girl to Loftus and then again to the girl.

"Are you sick, miss?"

"Go away," said Loftus, "there is nothing the matter."

"Nothing?" exclaimed Marie. "Nothing!" she repeated in a higher key.
"Nothing!" Then, visibly, anger enveloped her. "Do you call it nothing
to be cheated and decoyed? Nothing to have faith and love and be
gammoned of them by a living lie, by a perjury in flesh and blood? Is
that what you call nothing? Is it? Then tell me what something is?"

At the moment she stared at Loftus, her lips still moving, her breast
heaving, her small hands clenched, her face very white. And Loftus
stared at her. In the vehemence and contempt of her anger he did not
recognize at all the kitten of the year before. But it was very
vulgar, he decided.

That vulgarity Blanche complicated at once. "What has he done, miss?"
she asked, her hands on her hips.

"Done?" Marie echoed. "He has made me drink of shame. Now, tired of
that, he is going."