At that her big eyes opened widely.

“What should I tell you about Mr. Holloway?” she asked.  “What could I tell you about him?”

“It isn’t any use speaking like that,” he said; and with the words he suddenly leaped from his chair and began to plunge back and forth across the small room.  “You see I’m not a boy any more.  I’ve come to my senses.  I know now!  I understand now!  It’s all plain to me now.  Now and always.  I’ve been fooled once but only once and by All that Is, I never will be fooled again.  Your’re pretty and awfully fascinating, and it’s always fun for the woman—­especially if she knows all her bets are safely hedged.  And I was so completely done up that I was even more sport than the common run, I suppose; but—­” she was staring at him in unfeigned amazement, and he was lashing himself to fury with the feelings that underlaid his words—­“but even if you made it all right with yourself by calling your share by the name of ‘having a good influence’ over me (I know that’s how married women always pat themselves on the back while they’re sending us to the devil), even then, I think that it would have been better to have been fair and square with me.  It would have been better all round.  I’d have been left with some belief in—­in people.  As it is, when I saw that you’d only been laughing at me, I—­well, I went pretty far.”

He stopped short, and transfixed her paleness with his big, dark eyes.

“Why weren’t you honest?” he asked angrily.  And then he said again, more bitterly, more scornfully, than before:  “Why wasn’t I told about Holloway?”

She clasped her hands tightly together.

“What has been told you about Mr. Holloway and myself?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Then why do you speak as you do?”

At that he thrust his hands into his pockets and again began to fling himself back and forth across the room.

“Perhaps you’ll think I’m a sneak,” he said, “but I wasn’t a sneak.  I went in to see you that Saturday as usual, and when I went upstairs—­you were with him in the library.  I heard three words.  God! they were enough!  I didn’t know that anything could knock the bottom out of life so quickly.  My sun and stars all fell at once—­I reckon my Heaven went too.  At all events I went out of your house and down town and I drank and drank—­and all to the truth and honor of women.”

He halted with his back to her, and there was silence in the room for many minutes.

When he faced around after a little, she was weeping bitterly, having turned in her seat so that her face might be buried in the chair back.  Her whole body was shaking with suppressed sobs.  He stood still and stared down upon her and finally she lifted up her face and said with trembling lips: 

“And all the trouble came from that.  Oh, what shall I do?  What shall I say?”

“I don’t know what you can do, or what you can say,” he said, remaining still and watching her sincere distress.  “I’d feel pretty blamed mean if I were you, though.  Understand, I don’t question your good taste in choosing Holloway, nor your right to love him, nor his right to be there; but I fail to understand why you were to me just as you were, and I think it was unfair—­out-and-out mean!”