“Why?”

Joan did not answer at all.

“I’ll tell you,” Escobar flashed out at her angrily.  “You wouldn’t be seen with me any more!  Suddenly, you would not be seen with me—­no, not for the world!  That’s the truth, isn’t it?  That’s why you come secretly back and bid me meet you in an empty house.”

“Hush!” pleaded Joan.

Mario Escobar’s voice had risen as his own words flogged him to a keener indignation.

“Why should I care if all the world hears me?” he replied roughly.  “Why should I consider you, who turn me down the moment it suits you, without a reason?  It’s fairly galling to me, I assure you.”

Joan nodded her head.  Mario Escobar had some right upon his side, she was ready to acknowledge.

“I beg your pardon,” she said simply.  “Won’t you please be content with that and leave things as they are?”

“When you are a little older you will know that you can never leave things as they are,” answered Mario.  “I was looking forward to a week of happiness.  I have had a week of torment.  For lesser insults than yours, men kill in my country.”

There were other differences, too, between her country and his.  Joan did not cry out, or burst into tears or flinch in any way.  She was alone in this room; there was no one, as far as she knew, within the reach of her voice.  She had chosen this meeting-place, not altogether because the house would be empty, but because in this first serious difficulty of her life she would be amongst familiar things and draw from them confidence and strength, and a sense of security.  With Mario Escobar in front of her, his face ablaze with passion, the security vanished altogether.  Yet all the more she was raised to the top of her courage.

“Then I shall tell you the truth,” she answered gently.  “You speak to me of our friendship.  It was never anything serious to me.  It was a taunt—­a foolish taunt to other people.”

Mario Escobar flinched, as if she had struck him in the face.

“Yes, I hurt you,” she went on in the same gentle voice, which was not the least element in Escobar’s humiliation.  “I am very sorry.  I tried not to hurt you.  I am very ignorant, as you have told me, but I wouldn’t believe it till a week ago.  I made it my pride to be different from anybody else.  I believed that I was different.  I was a fool.  I wouldn’t listen.  Even during the war.  I have shut myself up away from it, trying not to share in the effort, not to feel the pride and the sorrow, pretending that it was just a horrible, sordid business altogether beneath lofty minds!  That’s one of the reasons why I chose you for my friend!  I was flinging my glove in the face of the little world I knew.  I had got to be different.  It’s all very shameful to tell, and I am sorry.  Oh, how I am sorry!”

Her sorrow was most evident.  She had sunk down upon a couch, her fair head drooping and the tears now running down her cheeks in the bitterness of her shame.  But Mario Escobar was untouched by any pity.  If any thought occurred to him outside his burning humiliation, it was prompted by the economy of the Spaniard.