“The same to you,” he called feverishly.

“Deppy,” she said firmly, a red spot in each cheek, her voice tense and strained to a high pitch of suppressed decision, “I shall marry Karl Brabetz.  That will be the end of your Mr. Chase.”

“I hope so,” he said.  “But I’m not so sure of it, if you continue to love him as you do now.”

She went out with her cheeks burning and a frightened air in her heart.  What right, what reason had he to say such things to her?  Her thoughts raced back to Neenah’s airy prophecy.

Bobby Browne and Agnes were approaching from the lower end of the balcony.  She drew back into the shadow suddenly, afraid that they might discover in her flushed face the signs of that ugly blow to her pride and her self-respect.  “I’m not so sure of it,” was whirling in her brain, repeating itself a hundred times over, stabbing her each time in a new and even more tender spot.

“If you continue to love him as you do now,” fought its way through the maze of horrid, disturbing thoughts.  How could she face the charge:  “I’m not so sure of it,” unless she killed the indictment “if you love him as you do now?”

Lady Agnes and Browne passed by without seeing her and entered the window.  She heard him say something to his companion, softly, tenderly—­she knew not what it was.  And Lady Agnes laughed—­yes, nervously.  Ah, but Agnes was playing!  She was not in love with this man.  It was different.  It was not what Neenah meant—­nor Deppingham, honest friend that he was.

Down below she heard voices.  She wondered—­inconsistently alert—­whether he was one of the speakers.  Thomas Saunders and Miss Pelham were coming in from the terrace.  They were in love with each other!  They could be in love with each other.  There was no law, no convention that said them nay!  They could marry—­and still love!  “If you continue to love him as you do now,” battered at the doors of her conscience.

Silently she stole off to her own rooms; stealthily, as if afraid of something she could not see but felt creeping up on her with an evil grin.  It was Shame!

Her maid came in and she prepared for bed.  Left alone, she perched herself in the window seat to cool her heated face with the breezes that swept on ahead of the storm which was coming up from the sea.  Her heart was hot; no breeze could cool it—­nothing but the ice of decision could drive out the fever that possessed it.  Now she was able to reason calmly with herself and her emotions.  She could judge between them.  Three sentences she had heard uttered that day crowded upon each other to be uppermost:  not the weakest of which was one which had fallen from the lips of Hollingsworth Chase.

“It is impossible—­incredible!” she was saying to herself.  “I could not love him like that.  I should hate him.  God above me, am I not different from those women whom I have known and pitied and despised?  Am I not different from Guelma von Herrick?  Am I not different from Prince Henri’s wife?  Ah, and they loved, too!  And is he not different from those other men—­those weak, unmanly men, who came into the lives of those women?  Ah, yes, yes!  He is different.”