"I daresay Louis Gigue knows as much of you as most men do,"--she replied, quietly--"But I never speak of you to him. Indeed, I never speak of you at all unless you are spoken of, and not always then. You do not interest me sufficiently!"
She moved towards the house. He followed her.
"Your remarks have been somewhat rambling and disjointed,"--he said- -"But essentially feminine, after all. And they merely tend to one thing--that you are still an untamed shrew!"
She looked back at him over her shoulder. Her eyes gleamed in the moonlight,--a faint smile curved her pretty mouth.
"If I am, it will need someone braver than you are to tame me!" she said--"A trickster is always a coward!"
With an angry exclamation he flung away the end of his cigar,--it fell into a harmless bed of mignonette and seared the sweet blossom, burning redly in the green like a wicked eye. And then he caught her hand firmly and held it grasped as in a vice.
"You insult me!" he said, thickly--"And I shall not forget it! You talk as a child talks--though you are no child! You are a woman of the world--you have travelled--you have had experience--and you know men. You are perfectly aware that the sentimental 'love' you speak of exists nowhere except in poems and story-books--you know that no sane man alive would tie himself to one woman save for the law's demand that his heirs shall be lawfully born. You are no shrinking maid in her teens, that you should start and recoil or blush, at the truth of the position, and it is the merest affectation on your part to talk about 'love lasting forever,' for you are perfectly aware that it cannot last very long over the honeymoon. The natural state of man is polygamous. Englishmen are the same as Turks or Hottentots in this respect, except for the saving grace of hypocrisy, which is the chief prop of European civilisation. If it were not for hypocrisy, we should all be savages as utterly and completely as in primaeval days! You know all this as well as I do--and yet you feign to desire the impossible, while all the time you play the fool with a country parson! But I'll make you pay for it--by Heaven, I will! You scorn me and my name--you call me a social leper---"
"You are one!" she said, wrenching her hand from his clasp--"And what is more, you know it, and you glory in it! Who are your associates? Men who are physically or morally degenerate--women who, so long as their appetites are satisfied, seek nothing more! You play the patron to a certain literary 'set' who produce books unfit to be read by any decent human being,--you work your way, by means of your title and position, through society, contaminating everything you touch! You contaminate ME by associating my name with yours!--and my aunt helps you in the wicked scheme! I came here to my own home--to the house where my father died--thinking that perhaps here at least I should find peace,"--and her voice shook as with tears--"that here, at least, the old walls might give me shelter and protection!--but even here you followed me with your paid spy, Marius Longford--and I have found myself surrounded by your base tools almost despite myself! But even if you try to hound me into my grave, I will never marry you! I would rather die a hundred times over than be your wife!"