“You think she has always cared for him?” asked Max.  He tried to smooth his tone down to one of calm interest, but it alarmed Hickson.

“I don’t know,” he returned hastily.  “I used to think so, but I may be wrong.  I thought the same thing about you at the Usshers’.  She kept saying she wasn’t a bit in love with you, but it seemed to me she was different with you from what she had ever been with any one else.  I suppose I oughtn’t to have said that either.  Upon my word, Riatt, it is awfully good of you to let me talk like this!  I can assure you it is a great relief to me.”

His companion could hardly have echoed this sentiment.  As he walked back alone to his hotel, he found that Hickson’s words had put the last touches to his mental discomfort.

At first his own conduct had seemed inexplicable to him.  Everything had been going well, he had been just about to be free from the whole entanglement, when an impulse of primitive jealousy and fierce masculine egotism had suddenly brought him to New York and bound him hand and foot.  It had not been an agreeable prospect—­to live among people whose standards he did not understand, with a woman whom he did not love.  But, since his conversation with Hickson, his eyes were opened, and he saw the situation in far more tragic colors.

He did love her.  He did not believe in her or trust her; he had no illusions as to her feeling for him, but his for her was clear—­he loved her, loved her with that strange mingling of passion and hatred so often found and so rarely admitted.

He could imagine a man’s learning, even under the most suspicious circumstances, to conquer jealousy of a woman who loved him.  Or he could imagine having confidence in a woman who did not pretend love.  But to be married to a woman whom you love, without a shred of belief either in her principles or her affection, seemed to Riatt about as terrible a prospect as could be offered to a human being.

There was just one chance for him—­that Christine might be willing to release him.  If she really loved Linburne, if there had been some sort of understanding between them in the past, if his coming had only precipitated a lovers’ quarrel, then certainly Christine had too much intelligence to let such a chance slip through her fingers just on the eve of Linburne’s divorce.  Nor was she, he thought bitterly, too proud to stoop to ask a man to reconsider; nor did it seem likely, however deeply Linburne’s vanity had been wounded, that he would refuse to listen.

With this in mind, as soon as he reached his hotel, he sat down and wrote her a letter: 

“My dear Christine: 

“What was it, according to your idea, that happened this afternoon?  I believed that for the first time I asked you to marry me, and that you, for the first time definitely accepted me.  But as I think over your manner, I am led to think you supposed it was just a continuation of our old joke.