raying by neither sign nor movement that her words could hurt him.

"I beg to suggest again," said Jack composedly, "that Oscard has not
yet brought any accusations against you. You have brought them all
yourself."

"You are both cruel and cowardly," she exclaimed, suddenly descending to
vituperation. "Two to one. Two men--GENTLEMEN--against one defenceless
girl. Of course I am not able to argue with you. Of course you can get
the best of me. It is so easy to be sarcastic."

"I do not imagine," retorted Jack, "that anything that we can say or do
will have much permanent power of hurting you. For the last two years
you have been engaged in an--intrigue, such as a thin-skinned or
sensitive person would hardly of her own free will undertake. You may
be able to explain it to yourself--no doubt you are--but to our more
limited comprehensions it must remain inexplicable. We can only judge
from appearances."

"And of course appearances go against me--they always do against a
woman," she cried rather brokenly.

"You would have been wise to have taken that peculiarity into
consideration sooner," replied Jack Meredith coldly. "I admit that I
am puzzled; I cannot quite get at your motive. Presumably it is one of
those--SWEET feminine inconsistencies which are so charming in books."

There was a little pause. Jack Meredith waited politely to hear if she
had anything further to say. His clean-cut face was quite pallid; the
suppressed anger in his eyes was perhaps more difficult to meet than
open fury. The man who never forgets himself before a woman is likely to
be an absolute master of women.

"I think," he added, "that there is nothing more to be said."

There was a dead silence. Millicent Chyne glanced towards Guy Oscard.
He could have saved her yet--by a simple lie. Had he been an impossibly
magnanimous man, such as one meets in books only, he could have
explained that the mistake was all his, that she was quite right, that
his own vanity had blinded him into a great and unwarranted presumption.
But, unfortunately, he was only a human being--a man who was ready to
give as full a measure as he exacted. The unfortunate mistake to which
he clung was that the same sense of justice, the same code of honour,
must serve for men and women alike. So Millicent Chyne looked in vain
for that indulgence which is so inconsistently offered to women, merely
because they are women--the indulgence which is sometimes given and
sometimes w