“I beg your pardon,” said Mabyn meekly.  “I only want to say a word or two.  Wouldn’t it be better here than before the servants?” With that she led Wenna away.  In a minute or two she returned.

Mr. Roscorla would rather have been shut up in a den with a hungry tigress.  “I am quite at your service,” he said with a bitter irony.  “I suppose you have some very important communication to make, considering the way in which you—­”

“Interfered?  Yes, it is time that I interfered,” Mabyn said, still quite calm and a trifle pale.  “Mr. Roscorla, to be frank, I don’t like you, and perhaps I am not quite fair to you.  I am only a young girl, and don’t know what the world would say about your relations with Wenna.  But Wenna is my sister, and I see she is wretched; and her wretchedness—­Well, that comes of her engagement to you.”

She was standing before him with her eyes cast down, apparently determined to be very moderate in her speech.  But there was a cruel frankness in her words which hurt Mr. Roscorla a good deal more than any tempest of passion into which she might have worked herself.  “Is that all?” said he.  “You have not startled me with any revelations.”

“I was going to say,” continued Mabyn, “that a gentleman who has really a regard for a girl would not insist on her keeping a promise which only rendered her unhappy.  I don’t see what you are to gain by it.  I suppose you—­you expect Wenna to marry you?  Well, I dare say if you called on her to punish herself that way, she might do it.  But what good would that do you?  Would you like to have a wife who was in love with another man?”

“You have become quite logical, Miss Mabyn,” said he, “and argument suits you better than getting into a rage.  And much of what you say is quite true.  You are a very young girl.  You don’t know much of what the world would say about anything.  But being furnished with these admirable convictions, did it never occur to you that you might not be acting wisely in blundering into an affair of which you know nothing?”

The coldly sarcastic fashion in which he spoke threatened to disturb Mabyn’s forced equanimity.  “Know nothing?” she said.  “I know everything about it, and I can see that my sister is miserable:  that is sufficient reason for my interference.  Mr. Roscorla, you won’t ask her to marry you?”

Had the proud and passionate Mabyn condescended to make an appeal to her ancient enemy?  At last she raised her eyes, and they seemed to plead for mercy.

“Come, come,” he said, roughly:  “I’ve had enough of all this sham beseeching.  I know what it means.  Trelyon is a richer man than I am:  she has let her idle girlish notions go dreaming day-dreams, and so I am expected to stand aside.  There has been enough of this nonsense.  She is not a child; she knows what she undertook of her own free will; and she knows she can get rid of this school-girl fancy directly if she chooses.  I, for one, won’t help her to disgrace herself.”