you for yourself?'

'Again there are two sides to the question, Mrs Lammle. What do you
pretend to believe?'

'So you first deceive me and then insult me!' cries the lady, with a
heaving bosom.

'Not at all. I have originated nothing. The double-edged question was
yours.'

'Was mine!' the bride repeats, and her parasol breaks in her angry hand.

His colour has turned to a livid white, and ominous marks have come to
light about his nose, as if the finger of the very devil himself had,
within the last few moments, touched it here and there. But he has
repressive power, and she has none.

'Throw it away,' he coolly recommends as to the parasol; 'you have made
it useless; you look ridiculous with it.'

Whereupon she calls him in her rage, 'A deliberate villain,' and so
casts the broken thing from her as that it strikes him in falling. The
finger-marks are something whiter for the instant, but he walks on at
her side.

She bursts into tears, declaring herself the wretchedest, the most
deceived, the worst-used, of women. Then she says that if she had
the courage to kill herself, she would do it. Then she calls him vile
impostor. Then she asks him, why, in the disappointment of his base
speculation, he does not take her life with his own hand, under the
present favourable circumstances. Then she cries again. Then she is
enraged again, and makes some mention of swindlers. Finally, she sits
down crying on a block of stone, and is in all the known and unknown
humours of her sex at once. Pending her changes, those aforesaid marks
in his face have come and gone, now here now there, like white steps
of a pipe on which the diabolical performer has played a tune. Also his
livid lips are parted at last, as if he were breathless with running.
Yet he is not.

'Now, get up, Mrs Lammle, and let us speak reasonably.'

She sits upon her stone, and takes no heed of him.

'Get up, I tell you.'

Raising her head, she looks contemptuously in his face, and repeats,
'You tell me! Tell me, forsooth!'

She affects not to know that his eyes are fastened on her as she droops
her head again; but her whole figure reveals that she knows it uneasily.

'Enough of this. Come! Do you hear? Get up.'

Yielding to his hand, she rises, and they walk again; but this time with
their faces turned towards their place of residence.

'Mrs Lammle, we have both been deceiving, and we have both been
deceived. We have both been biting, and we have bo