“You loved him?”

“Certainly not.  He always had too high an opinion of himself, and I used to enjoy taking it out of him—­and making it up to him afterwards, too.  I used to enjoy that as well.  Sometimes, of course, he found the process too unbearable; and in one of his fits of anger at me, just after he left college, he went and blundered into this marriage with Pauline.  She, you see, took him at his own valuation.  His marriage seemed to put an end to everything between us—­”

“You surprise me.”

Christine laughed.  “Ah, I was younger then.”

“You kept on seeing him?”

“Naturally we met now and then.  Sometimes he used to tell me how I was the only woman—­”

“That is your idea of putting an end to everything?”

“Oh, if one took seriously all the men who say that—­I did not think much about Lee’s feelings for me, until my engagement was announced.  Then it appeared that the notion of my marrying some one else was intolerable to him.”

“A high order of affection,” exclaimed Riatt.  “He was content enough until there seemed some chance of your being happy.”

“Perhaps he did not consider that life with you would promise absolute happiness, Max.”

“I don’t call that love.  I call it jealousy.”

At this Christine laughed outright.  “And what emotion, may I ask, has just brought you here in such haste?”

The thrust went home.  Riatt changed countenance.

“But I,” he said, “never pretended to love you.”

“Why then are you marrying me?”

“Heaven knows.”

“I know, too,” she answered, unperturbed by his rudeness, “and some day if you’re good I’ll tell you.”

Her calm assumption that everything was well seemed to him unbearable.  “I don’t know that I feel very much inclined to chat,” he said, turning toward the door.  “I’ll see you sometime to-morrow.”

She said nothing to oppose him, and he left the room.  Downstairs the same footman was waiting to let him out.  To him, at least, Riatt seemed a triumphant lover, only as Linburne had long since heavily subsidized him, even his admiration was tinctured with regret.

As for Max, himself, he left the house even more restless and dissatisfied than he had entered it.

To be honest, he had, he knew, sometimes imagined a moment when he would take Christine in his arms and say:  “Marry me anyhow.”  Such an action he knew would be reckless, but he had supposed it would be pleasant.  But now there was nothing but bitterness and jealousy in his mood.  What did he know or care for such people? he said to himself.  What did he know of their standards and their histories?  How much of Christine’s story about Linburne was to be believed?  What more natural than that they had always loved each other?  Some one knew the truth—­every one, very likely, except himself.  But whom could he ask?  He could have believed Nancy on one side as little as Laura on the other.