“Clumsy, very clumsy!” she rebuked him.  “I see that you are accustomed to prepare your lies in advance, Mr. Woods.  As an extemporaneous liar you are very clumsy.  Men don’t propose by mistake except in farces.  And while we are speaking of farces, don’t you think it time to drop that one of your not knowing about that last will?”

“The farce!” Billy stammered.  “You—­why, you saw me when I found it!”

“Ah, yes, I saw you when you pretended to find it.  I saw you when you pretended to unlock that centre place.  But now, of course, I know it never was locked.  I’m very careless about locking things, Mr. Woods.  Ah, yes, that gave you a beautiful opportunity, didn’t it?  So, when you were rummaging through my desk—­without my permission, by the way, but that’s a detail—­you found both wills and concocted your little comedy?  That was very clever.  Oh, you think you’re awfully smooth, don’t you, Billy Woods?  But if you had been a bit more daring, don’t you see, you could have suppressed the last one and taken the money without being encumbered by me?  That was rather clumsy of you, wasn’t it?” Suave, gentle, sweet as honey was the speech of Margaret as she lifted her face to his, but her eyes were tragedies.

“Ah!” said Billy.  “Ah—­yes—­you think—­that.”  He was very careful in articulating his words, was Billy, and afterward he nodded his head gravely.  The universe had somehow suffered an airy dissolution like that of Prospero’s masque—­Selwoode and its gardens, the great globe itself, “the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples” were all as vanished wraiths.  There was only Peggy left—­ Peggy with that unimaginable misery in her eyes that he must drive away somehow.  If that was what she thought, there was no way for him to prove it wasn’t so.

“Why, dear me, Mr. Woods,” she retorted, carelessly, “what else could I think?”

Here Mr. Woods blundered.

“Ah, think what you will, Peggy!” he cried, his big voice cracking and sobbing and resonant with pain.  “Ah, my dear, think what you will, but don’t grieve for it, Peggy!  Why, if I’m all you say I am, that’s no reason you should suffer for it!  Ah, don’t, Peggy!  In God’s name, don’t!  I can’t bear it, dear,” he pleaded with her, helplessly.

Billy was suffering, too.  But her sorrow was the chief of his, and what stung him now to impotent anger was that she must suffer and he be unable to help her—­for, ah, how willingly, how gladly, he would have borne all poor Peggy’s woes upon his own broad shoulders.

But none the less, he had lost an invaluable opportunity to hold his tongue.

“Suffer!  I suffer!” she mocked him, languidly; and then, like a banjo-string, the tension snapped, and she gave a long, angry gasp, and her wrath flamed.