“Sandy, you’re rather a dear!” she said gratefully.

And then Peter came in, and Sandy hastened to make himself scarce.

A dead silence followed his hurried exit.  Nan found herself trembling, and for a moment she dared not lift her eyes to Peter’s face for fear of what she might read there.  At last: 

“Peter,” she said, without looking at him.  “Are you still—­angry with me?”

“What makes you think I am angry?”

She looked up at that, then shrank back from the bitter hardness in his face almost as though he had dealt her a blow.

“Oh, you are—­you are!” she cried tremulously.

“Don’t you think most men would be in the same circumstances?”

“I don’t understand,” she said very low.

“No?  I suppose you wouldn’t,” he replied.  “You don’t seem to understand the meaning of the word—­faithfulness.  Perhaps you can’t help it—­you’re half a Varincourt! . . .  Don’t you realise what you’ve done?  You’ve torn down our love and soiled it—­made it nothing!  I believed in you as I believed in God. . . .  And then you run away with Maryon Rooke!  One man or another—­apparently it’s all the same to you.”

She rose and drew rather timidly towards him.

“Has it—­hurt you—­like that?” she said whisperingly.  “You didn’t mind—­about Roger.  Not in the same way.”

“Mind?”

The word came hoarsely, and his hands, hanging loosely at his sides, slowly clenched.  All the anguish of thwarting, the torture of a man who knows that the woman he loves will be another man’s wife, found utterance in that one short word.  Nan shivered at the stark agony in his tone.  She did not attempt to answer him.  There was nothing she could say.  She could only stand voiceless and endure the pain-racked silence which followed.

It seemed to her that an infinity of time dragged by before he spoke again.  When he did, it was in quiet, level tones out of which every atom of emotion had been crushed.

“You were pledged to Trenby,” he said slowly.  “That was different.  I couldn’t ask you to break your pledge to him, even had I been free to do so.  You were his, not mine. . . .  But you had given no promise to Maryon Rooke.”

The incalculable reproach and accusation of those last words seemed to burn their way right into her heart.  In a flash of revelation the whole thing became clear to her.  She saw how bitterly she had failed the man she loved in that mad moment when she had thrown up everything and gone away with Maryon.

Dimly she acquiesced in the fact that there were excuses to be made—­the long strain of the preceding months, her illness, leaving her with weakened nerves, and, finally, Roger’s outrageous behaviour in the studio that day.  But of these she would not speak to Peter.  Had he not saved her from herself she would have wrecked her whole life by now, and she felt that, to him, she could not make excuses—­however valid they might be.