The intonation was expressionless, and yet, it seemed to her, a little wary.

“I ask chiefly because—­well, because I think they are.”

He looked at her for a minute more, perhaps for longer.

“Well, then—­you’re right.”

Again she had the sensation, familiar to her since yesterday, of the world reeling to pieces around her while her own personality survived.  When she spoke, her voice sounded as if it came out of the wildness of a surging wreck.

“Then that’s what you meant in saying yesterday that when everything was settled you still wouldn’t be able to pay all you owed.”

“That’s what I meant—­exactly.”

He lay perfectly still, except that he raised his hand and puffed at his extinct cigar.  She looked down at the pattern on the Persian rug beside his couch—­a symmetrical scroll of old rose, on a black ground sown with multicolored flowerets.

“I suppose it’s the Clay heirs and the Rodman heirs you owe the money to?”

“And the Compton heirs, and old Miss Burnaby, and the two Misses Brown, and—­”

“Haven’t they anything left?”

“Oh yes.  It isn’t all gone, by any means.”  Then he added, as if to make a clean breast of the affair and be done with it:  “The personal property—­what you may call the cash—­is mostly gone!  Those that have owned real estate—­like the Rodmans and Fanny Burnaby—­well, they’ve got that still.”

“I see.”  She continued to sit looking meditatively down at the rug.  “I suppose,” she ventured, after long thinking, “that that’s the money we’ve been living on all these years?”

“Yes; in the main.”  He felt it useless to quibble or to try to extenuate the facts.

“How many years would that be?”

“I’m not very sure; on and off, it’s about ten since I began using some of their money to—­help out my income.  Latterly—­you may as well know it—­I haven’t had any real income of my own at all.”

“So that their money has been paying for—­for all this.”

Her hands made a confused little gesture, indicating the luxury of his personal appointments and of the room.

He shrugged his shoulders and arched his eyebrows in a kind of protest, which was nevertheless not denial.  “W-well!  If you choose to put it so!”

“And for me, too,” she went on, looking at him now with a bewildered opening of her large gray eyes—­“for my visits, my clothes, my maid—­everything!”

“I don’t see any need,” he said, with a touch of peevishness, “for going so terribly into detail.”

“I don’t see how it can be helped.  It’s so queer—­and startling—­to think I’ve had so much that wasn’t mine.”

“You mustn’t think it was deliberately planned—­” he began, weakly.

“And now the suggestion is,” she interrupted, “that Mr. Davenant should pay for it.  That seems to me to make it even worse than—­than before.”

“I confess I don’t follow you there,” he complained.  “If he doesn’t—­then I go to Singville.”