lf between her and the door. "We must
understand each other, Miss Armytage."

"I think we do, Captain Tremayne," she answered, fire dancing in her
eyes. And she added: "You are detaining me."

"Intentionally." He was calm again; and he was masterful for the
first time in all his dealings with her. "We are very far from any
understanding. Indeed, we are overhead in a misunderstanding already.
You misconstrue my words. I am very angry with you. I do not think that
in all my life I have ever been so angry with anybody. But you are not
to mistake the source of my anger. I am angry with you for the great
wrong you have done yourself."

"That should not be your affair," she answered him, thus flinging back
the offending phrase.

"But it is. I make it mine," he insisted.

"Then I do not give you the right. Please let me pass." She looked him
steadily in the face, and her voice was calm to coldness. Only the heave
of her bosom betrayed the agitation under which she was labouring.

"Whether you give me the right or not, I intend to take it," he
insisted.

"You are very rude," she reproved him.

He laughed. "Even at the risk of being rude, then. I must make myself
clear to you. I would suffer anything sooner than leave you under any
misapprehension of the grounds upon which I should have preferred to
face a firing party rather than have been rescued at the sacrifice of
your good name."

"I hope," she said, with faint but cutting irony, "you do not intend to
offer me the reparation of marriage."

It took his breath away for a moment. It was a solution that in his
confused and irate state of mind he had never even paused to consider.
Yet now that it was put to him in this scornfully reproachful manner he
perceived not only that it was the only possible course, but also that
on that very account it might be considered by her impossible.

Her testiness was suddenly plain to him. She feared that he was come to
her with an offer of marriage out of a sense of duty, as an amende,
to correct the false position into which, for his sake, she had placed
herself. And he himself by his blundering phrase had given colour to
that hideous fear of hers.

He considered a moment whilst he stood there meeting her defiant glance.
Never had she been more desirable in his eyes; and hopeless as his
love for her had always seemed, never had it been in such danger of
hopelessness as at this present moment, unless he proceeded here with
the