arrive. And yet when at last I _did_ see
you, you would vouchsafe me neither smile nor glance. In fact, you
looked as if you _hated_ me!"

"_Every_ moment?" sardonically.

"Every one."

"Even those spent with Mrs. Bohun?" To save her life she could not call
her "Olga" now.

"With _her_?" staring in some surprise at his inquisitor. "Well, it
certainly wasn't quite so bad--the waiting, I mean--then. Though still,
with my mind full of you, I was----"

"You were indeed!" interrupting him hastily, with a contemptuous smile.

"Certainly I was," the surprise growing deeper.

"I wonder you are not ashamed to sit there and confess it," says Miss
Beresford, suddenly, with a wrathful flash in her eyes. "I shall know
how to believe you again. To say one thing to me one day, and another
thing to another person another day, and----" Here she finds a
difficulty in winding up this extraordinary speech, so she says,
hurriedly, "It is _horrible_!"

"What is horrible?" bewildered.

But she pays no heed to his question, thinking it doubtless beneath her.

"At least," she says, with fine scorn, "you needn't be untruthful."

"Do you know," says Mr. Desmond, desperately, "you are making the most
wonderful remarks I ever heard in my life? There is no beginning to
them, and I'm dreadfully afraid there will be no ending."

"No doubt," scornfully, "you are afraid."

"If I allow I am," says Desmond, humbly, "will it induce you to
explain?"

"You want no explanation," indignantly. "You know very well what you
confessed a while ago,--that--that--'_you were_'! _There!_"

"_Where?_"

"Flirting with Olga Bohun!"

"What?"

"You did. You know you did. Oh, what perfidy! Only a moment since you
declared it openly, shamelessly; and now you deny it! Why I wouldn't
have believed it, even of _you_. How _can_ you pretend to forget it?"

But that there are tears born of real emotion in her great eyes, Mr.
Desmond would assuredly believe she is making a vast joke at his
expense, so innocent is he of any offence.

"If by some unfortunate method," he says, calmly, "you have
metamorphosed any speech of mine into a declaration relative to a
flirtation with Mrs. Bohun, you have done an uncommonly clever thing.
You have turned a lie into truth. I never said even one spoony word to
Olga Bohun in all my life."

"Then why," in a still much-aggrieved tone, but with strong symptoms of
relenting, "did you say you were?"

"I don't remember sayin