social relation.

"Yes, I've money. Of course you wonder--but I've wanted you to wonder.
It was to make you take that in that I came. So now you know," she said,
leaning back where she faced him, but in a straighter chair and with her
arms closely folded, after a fashion characteristic of her, as for some
control of her nerves.

"You came to show you've money?"

"That's one of the things. Not a lot--not even very much. But enough,"
said Kate Cookham.

"Enough? I should think so!" he again couldn't help a bit crudely
exhaling.

"Enough for what I wanted. I don't always live like this--not at all.
But I came to the best hotel on purpose. I wanted to show you I could.
Now," she asked, "do you understand?"

"Understand?" He only gaped.

She threw up her loosed arms, which dropped again beside her. "I did it
_for_ you--I did it _for_ you!"

"'For' me----?"

"What I did--what I did here of old."

He stared, trying to see it. "When you made me pay you?"

"The Two Hundred and Seventy--all I could get from you, as you reminded
me yesterday, so that I had to give up the rest It was my idea," she
went on--"it was my idea."

"To bleed me quite to death?" Oh, his ice was broken now!

"To make you raise money--since you could, you _could_. You did, you
did--so what better proof?"

His hands fell from what he had touched; he could only stare--her own
manner for it was different now too. "I did. I did indeed--!" And the
woful weak simplicity of it, which seemed somehow all that was left him,
fell even on his own ear.

"Well then, here it is--it isn't lost!" she returned with a graver face.

"'Here' it is," he gasped, "my poor agonised old money--my blood?"

"Oh, it's _my_ blood too, you must know now!" She held up her head as
not before--as for her right to speak of the thing to-day most precious
to her. "I took it, but this--my being here this way--is what I've made
of it! That was the idea I had!"

Her "ideas," as things to boast of, staggered him. "To have everything
in the world, like this, at my wretched expense?"

She had folded her arms back again--grasping each elbow she sat firm;
she knew he could see, and had known well from the first, what she had
wanted to say, difficult, monstrous though it might be. "No more than
at my own--but to do something with your money that you'd never do
yourself."

"Myself, myself?" he wonderingly wailed. "Do you know--or don't
you?--what my life has been?"

She waite