every.

Eugene is flushed and angry, yet it does not make him the less
handsome, though it is very different from his usual indolent ease.

"What is the matter?" she asks, for form's sake, for she almost knows.

"Matter!" and he kicks viciously at a pebble that has dared to rear its
head in the smooth walk, sending it over on the grassy lawn. "The
matter is that Floyd is selling us all out with a high hand. That is
what Murray's visit and all this going to and fro mean. He has had an
offer, and he doesn't care for anything so long as _you_ come out on
the topmost round."

"I?" Violet flushes and her eyes grow moist.

"Well, it isn't your fault, after all, and one need not grudge you
anything," he says, strangely moved. "Yes, these men want to buy out
the whole thing, and you'll have a private fortune of your own that
will be stunning! Floyd isn't green at bargain-making. Now they have
gone over to tackle Wilmarth, and a sweet time they will have of it. I
should like to see the fun. But what am I to do afterward?" and he
studies the greensward gloomily.

"You?" she repeats, and the matter settles itself beautifully to her
vision. "Why, you will marry Miss Pauline Murray."

"Marry!" Eugene strides up and down with a grim sense of the irony of
fate. Once he was asked to marry Miss St. Vincent to save his fortune,
now it is Miss Murray. He is a part of the business, to be bandied
about and knocked down to the highest bidder.

"You do love her?"

Violet says this with the rarest, tenderest entreaty.

"Love her? No, I do not." He comes nearer to Violet with his eyes
aflame, his face pale, and his lips savagely compressed. "Have _you_
been so blind? Did that show deceive you? Why, you must guess, you must
know it is you and not she whom I love."

Violet sits astounded. She is too much amazed even to resent this.
Surely he cannot have been so deceitful, so false-hearted.

"You like me," she begins, tremulously, "and I am your sister, your
brother's wife----"

"And you might have been mine! It maddens me when I think of it."

"And it humiliates me."

"Oh, my darling, you must forgive it!" and Eugene throws himself at her
feet. "If I could have seen you, could have known you----"

"You did not like me when you first saw me," she interrupts, with quiet
dignity.

"No, because I held to an obstinate, hateful prejudice! But when I came
to know you----"

"And through all this time, Eugene, you have been offering