“No, I don’t think I have any now,” she answered, “I’ve tried to make myself believe I had—­I’ve told a lie to my conscience about it every day I lived—­but I don’t think I’ve ever really had faith in you since that night—­”

“And yet you are willing to marry me?” he asked, and the scorn in his voice stung her like a physical blow.  He looked at her with an angry glance, and while his eyes rested upon her, she understood that he had never really seen her in his life—­that he had never penetrated beyond the outward aspect, the trick of gesture.

“No!—­No!” she cried out suddenly, as if she had awakened in terror from her sleep.  At the instant she saw herself through his eyes, humiliated, beaten down, unwomanly, and she was possessed by a horror of her own individuality which she felt in some way to be a part of her horror of the man who had revealed it to her.

In his perplexity he had fallen back a step and stood now pulling nervously at his moustache with a gesture which recalled his resemblance to Perry Bridewell.  This gesture, more than any words he spoke, shocked her into an acuteness of perception which was almost unnatural in its vividness.  It was as if her soul, so long drugged to insensibility, had started up in the last battle for liberation.

“No—­no—­it is impossible!” she repeated.

“Aren’t you rather late in coming to this decision?” he enquired with a short laugh.

But his irony was wasted upon her, for she saw only the look in his eyes, which revealed her deception to her in a blaze of scorn—­and she felt that she hated him and herself with an almost equal hatred.

“I am sorry, but—­but I can’t,” she stammered.  Feeling her words to be ineffectual she cast about wildly for some reason, some explanation however trivial—­and in the effort she found her eyes wandering aimlessly about the room, taking in the scattered wedding presents, his dejected yet angry look, and the fading white rosebud Gerty had pinned jauntily in his coat.  Then at last she realised that there was nothing further that she could say, so she stood helplessly knotting the silver cord while she watched the furious perplexity in which he tugged at his moustache.

“I can’t for the life of me see why you should be so damned jealous, Laura,” he burst out presently, thrust back from the surface conventions into a brute impulse of rage.

“I told you I didn’t know,” she answered irritably, “I told you that—­”

“Of course, I’m willing to let it go this time,” he went on, with what she felt to be a complacent return to his lordly attitude, “there’s no use making a fuss, so we may as well forget it—­but, for heaven’s sake, don’t give me a jealous wife.  There’s nothing under heaven more likely to drive a man insane.”

Some elusive grace in her attitude—­a suggestion of a wild thing poised for flight—­arrested him suddenly as he looked at her; and she saw his face change instantly while the fire of passion leaped to his eyes.