“Well, Rose,” he said, in as pleasant a voice as his perturbation of mind would permit him to use.

“Well, Fabian,” she answered.

She was as white and hard as marble; her lips when she ceased to speak were closed tightly, her blue eyes blazed from her hard, white face.

“What brings you here?” he inquired.

“What brings me here, indeed!  To see you.  Only this morning I heard of your intended business.  Only this morning, after the morning train had left.  If there had been another train within an hour or two, I should have taken it and gone to the city and should have been in time to stop the wicked wedding.”

“What a blessing that there was not!  You could not have stopped the marriage.  You would only have exposed yourself and made a row.”

“Then I should have done that.”

“I don’t think so.  It would not have been like you.  You are too cool, too politic to ruin yourself.  Come, Rose,” looking at his watch, “there are but just sixteen minutes before the train starts.  I have just fifteen to give you, because it will take me one minute to reach my seat.  Therefore, whatever you have to say, my dear, had better be said at once.”

“I have not come here to reproach you, Fabian Rockharrt,” she said, fixing him with her eyes.

“That is kind of you at all events.”

“No; we reproach a man for carelessness, for thoughtlessness, for forgetfulness; but for baseness, villainy, treachery like yours it is not reproach, it is—­”

“Magnanimity or murder!  I suppose so.  Let it be magnanimity, Rose.  I have never done you anything but good since I first met your face, now twenty years ago.  You were but sixteen then.  You are thirty-six now, and, by Jove! handsomer than ever.”

“Thank you; I quite well know that I am.  My looking glass, that never flatters, tells me so.”

“Then why, in the name of common sense, can you not be happy?  Look you, Rose, you have no cause to complain of me.  When even in your childhood, you—­”

“How dare you throw that up to me!” she exclaimed.

He went on as if he had not heard her.

“Were utterly lost and ruined through the villainy of your first lover—­what did I do?  I took you up, got a place for you in my father’s house as the governess of my niece.”

“Well, I worked for my living there, did I not?  I gave a fair day’s work for a fair day’s wages, as your stony old father would say.”

“Certainly, you did.  But you would not have had an opportunity of doing so in any honest way if it had not been for me.”

“How dare you hit me in the teeth with that!”

“Only in self-defense, my Rose.”

“It was with an ulterior, a selfish, a wicked end in view.  You know it.”

“I know, and Heaven knows that I served you from pure benevolence and from no other motive.  Gracious goodness! why, I was over head and ears in love with another woman at that time.  But you, Rose, you made a dead set at me.  You did not care for me the least in life, but you cared for wealth and position, and you were bound to have them if you could.”