“Indeed!  It must be rather confusing to be several people.  Your friend, Mr. Blake, as your letters showed, was rather given to enigmatical statements.  I should like to know him.  Would you please, John, to bring me my fan—­I left it in that delightful book you interrupted.”

“Certainly,” he said, now a trifle more at ease.  For Leila to ask of any one such a service was so unlike her that he felt it to be a betrayal of embarrassment, and was humorously pleased as he went and came again.

She took the fan and played with that expressive piece of a woman’s outfit while John brought the talk back to its starting-point.

“Cannot you be the Leila I used to know—­a frank girl; or are you to use one of your many disguises and just leave things as they have been of late?”

“If you will say plainly just what you mean, John”—­the fan was in active use—­“I will be as frank as possible.”

“But you may not like it, Leila.”

“Oh, go on.  I know you are going to be unpleasant.”

He looked at her with surprise.  “We are fencing—­and I hate it.  Once at West Point I was fencing with a man, my friend; the button broke off my foil and I hurt him seriously.  He fell dead beside me in the trenches at Vicksburg—­dead!”

“Oh, John!”—­the fan ceased moving.

“What I mean is that one may chance, you or I, to say something that will leave in memory that which no years will blot out.  Don’t be vexed with me.  I have had a cruel summer.  What with Uncle Jim and Aunt Ann—­and now with you, I—­well—­you told me after that dreadful night when Uncle Jim was so wild that I had insulted you—­”

“Don’t talk of it,” she cried.  “I was put to shame before all those grinning people.  You ought to have said nothing—­or something better than that farmer boy said—­”

“Well—­perhaps, Leila; but the point is not what I said in my desire to help you and stop a man for the time insane.  The point is that I did not insult you; for an insult to be really that it must be intentional.”

“Then you think I was unreasonably angry?”

“Yes, I do; and ever since then you have been coldly civil.  I cannot stand it.  I shall never again ask you for what you cannot give, but if you are to continue to resent what I said, then Grey Pine is no home for me.”

She stood up, the fan falling to the floor.  “What do you want me to say, John Penhallow?”

“Wait a little—­just a word more.  It was what poor Uncle Jim said that hurt you.  You could not turn on him; in your quite natural dismay or disgust you turned on me, who meant only to help in a dreadful situation.  You know I am right”—­his voice rose as he went on—­“it is I, not you, who am insulted.  If you were a man, I should ask for an apology; as you are the woman I have hopelessly loved for years, I will not ask you to say you were wrong—­I do not want you to say that.  I want you to say you are sorry you hurt me.”