“She’ll spoil that frock if she goes on crying,” he said to himself, “and it was very expensive.”

“I have nothing but remorse to offer in atonement,” she went on.  “But that remorse is very sincere——­”

Mario Escobar swept her plea aside with a furious gesture.

“So that’s it!” he cried.  “You were just making a fool of me!” That she, this pretty pink and white girl, should have been making a show of him, parading him before her friends, exhibiting him, using him as a challenge—­just as in fact he had been using her, and with more success!  Only to think of it hurt him like a knife.  “Your remorse!” he cried scornfully.  “There’s some one else, of course!”

Joan sat up straight and stiff.  Escobar might have laid a lash across her delicate shoulders.

“Yes,” she said defiantly.

“Some one who was not here a week ago?”

“Yes.”

To Escobar’s humiliation was now added a sudden fire of jealousy.  For the first time to-night, as woman, as flesh and blood, she was adorable, and she owed this transformation, not to him, no, not in the tiniest fraction of a degree to him, but to some one else, some dull boor without niceties or deftness, who had stormed into her life within the week.  Who was it?  He had got to know.  But Joan was hardly thinking of Escobar.  Her eyes were turned from him.

“He has set me free from many vanities and follies.  If I am grieved and ashamed now, I owe it thankfully to him.  If my remorse is bitter, it is because through him I have a gleam of light which helps me to understand.”

“And you have told him what you have told me?”

“No, but I shall to-night when all this is over, when I go back to Harrel.”

Mario Escobar moved closer to her.

“Are you so sure that you are going back to Harrel to-night?” he asked in a low voice.

“Yes,” she replied, and only after she had spoken did the menace of his voice force itself into her mind as something which she must take into account.  She looked up at him startled, and as she looked her wonderment turned into stark fear.  The cry that in his country men killed had left her unmoved.  But she was afraid now, desperately afraid, all the more afraid because she thought of the man searching for her through the reception-rooms at Harrel.

“We are alone here in an empty quarter of the house.  So you arranged it,” he continued.  “Good!  Women do not amuse themselves at my expense without being paid for it.”

Joan started up in a panic, but Escobar seized her shoulders and forced her down again.

“Sit still,” he cried savagely.  Then his face changed.  For the first time for many minutes his lips parted in a smile of pleasure.

“You are very lovely, Joan.  I love to see you like that—­afraid—­trembling.  It is the beginning of recompense.”

Joan had tumbled into a deeper pit than any she had dreamed of.  In desperation she cast about for means to climb out of it.  The secrecy of this meeting—­that must go.  But, even so, was there escape?  The bell?  Before she could be half-way across the room, he would be holding her in his arms.  A cry?  Before it was half uttered, he would have stifled her mouth.  No, she must sit very still and provoke no movement by him.