“Who told you she broke?” Andrew demanded.

“I guessed,” said Helen.  “You’d never have had the courage to break it off yourself.”

Andrew made a vicious movement.

“If you mean to serve me as you served Emanuel,” she remarked, with bitter calm, “please do it as gently as you can.  And don’t throw me far.  I can only swim a little.”

Andrew walked away.

“Good-night,” she called.

“Look here!” he snarled coming back to her “What’s the matter with you?  I know I oughtn’t to have asked Lilian to marry me.  Everybody knows that.  It’s universally agreed.  But are you going to make that an excuse for spoiling the whole show?  What’s up with you is pride.”

“And what is up with you?” she inquired.

“Pride,” said he.  “How could I know you were in love with me all the time?  How could——­”

“You couldn’t,” said Helen.  “I wasn’t.  No more than you were with me.”

“If you weren’t in love with me, why did you try to make me jealous?”

“Me try to make you jealous!” she exclaimed, disdainfully.  “You flatter yourself, Mr. Dean!”

“I can stand a good deal, but I can’t stand lies, and I won’t!” he exploded.  “I say you did try to make me jealous.”

He then noticed that she was crying.

The duologue might have extended itself indefinitely if her tears had not excited him to uncontrollable fury, to that instinctive cruelty that every male is capable of under certain conditions.  Without asking her permission, without uttering a word of warning, he rushed at her and seized her in his arms.  He crushed her with the whole of his very considerable strength.  And he added insult to injury by kissing her about forty seven times.  Women are such strange, incalculable creatures.  Helen did not protest.  She did not invoke the protection of Heaven.  She existed, passively and silently, the unremonstrating victim of his disgraceful violence.

Then he held her at arm’s length.  “Will you marry me?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Did you try to make me jealous?”

“Yes.”

Later, as they walked by the lake, he ejaculated:  “I’m an awful brute!”

“I like you as you are,” she replied.

But the answer was lacking in precision, for at that moment he was being as tender as only an awful brute can be.

“Of course,” she said, “we mustn’t say anything about it yet.”

“No,” he agreed.  “To let it out at once might make unpleasantness between you and the Swetnams.”

“Oh!” she said, “I wasn’t thinking of that.  But there’s another love-affair in the house, and no house will hold two at once.  It would be nauseating.”

That is how they talk in the Five Towns.  As if one could have too much love, even in a cottage—­to say nothing of a Wilbraham Hall!  Mrs. Ollerenshaw placidly decided that she and James would live at the Hall, though James would have preferred something a size smaller.  As I have already noticed, the staircase suited her; James suited her, too.  No one could guess why, except possibly James.  They got on together, as the Five Towns said, “like a house afire.”