ed Lesbia, furiously. 'What right had he to come to us under false
colours, to pretend to be poor, a nobody--with only the vaguest hope of
making a decent position in the future?--and to offer himself under such
impossible conditions to a girl brought up as I had been--a girl
educated by one of the proudest and most ambitious of women--to force me
to renounce everything except him? How could he suppose that any girl,
so placed, could decide in his favour? If he had loved me he would have
told me the truth--he would not have made it impossible for me to accept
him.'

'I believe he is a very high flown young man,' said Lady Kirkbank,
soothingly; 'he was never in _my_ set, you know, dear. And I suppose he
had some old Minerva-press idea that he would find a girl who would
marry him for his own sake. And your sister, no doubt, eager to marry
_anybody_, poor child, for the sake of getting away from that very
lovely dungeon of Lady Maulevrier's, snapped at the chance; and by a
mere fluke she becomes a countess.'

Lesbia ignored these consolatory remarks. She was pacing the room like
a tigress, her delicate cambric handkerchief grasped between her two
hands, and torn and rent by the convulsive action of her fingers. She
could have thrown herself from the balcony on to the spikes of the area
railings, she could have dashed herself against yonder big plate-glass
window looking towards the Green Park, like a bird which shatters his
little life against the glass barrier which he mistakes for the open
sky. She could have flung herself down on the floor and grovelled, and
torn her hair--she could have done anything mad, wicked, desperate, in
the wild rage of this moment.

'Loved me!' she exclaimed; 'he never loved me. If he had he would have
told me the truth. What, when I was in his arms, my head upon his
breast, my whole being surrendered to him, adoring him, what more could
he want? He must have known that this meant real love. And why should he
put it upon me to fight so hard a fight--to brave my grandmother's
anger--to be cursed by her--to face poverty for his sake? I never
professed to be a heroine. He knew that I was a woman, with all a
woman's weakness, a woman's fear of trial and difficulty in the future.
It was a cowardly thing to use me so.'

'It was,' said Lady Kirkbank, in the same soothing tone; 'but if you
liked this Hammond-Hartfield creature--a little in those old days, I
know you have outlived that liking long