“When what?” said Newman.

“When others have been most unhappy!”

“What others?” Newman asked.  “What have you to do with any others but me?  Besides you said just now that you wanted happiness, and that you should find it by obeying your mother.  You contradict yourself.”

“Yes, I contradict myself; that shows you that I am not even intelligent.”

“You are laughing at me!” cried Newman.  “You are mocking me!”

She looked at him intently, and an observer might have said that she was asking herself whether she might not most quickly end their common pain by confessing that she was mocking him.  “No; I am not,” she presently said.

“Granting that you are not intelligent,” he went on, “that you are weak, that you are common, that you are nothing that I have believed you were—­what I ask of you is not heroic effort, it is a very common effort.  There is a great deal on my side to make it easy.  The simple truth is that you don’t care enough about me to make it.”

“I am cold,” said Madame de Cintre, “I am as cold as that flowing river.”

Newman gave a great rap on the floor with his stick, and a long, grim laugh.  “Good, good!” he cried.  “You go altogether too far—­you overshoot the mark.  There isn’t a woman in the world as bad as you would make yourself out.  I see your game; it’s what I said.  You are blackening yourself to whiten others.  You don’t want to give me up, at all; you like me—­you like me.  I know you do; you have shown it, and I have felt it.  After that, you may be as cold as you please!  They have bullied you, I say; they have tortured you.  It’s an outrage, and I insist upon saving you from the extravagance of your own generosity.  Would you chop off your hand if your mother requested it?”

Madame de Cintre looked a little frightened.  “I spoke of my mother too blindly, the other day.  I am my own mistress, by law and by her approval.  She can do nothing to me; she has done nothing.  She has never alluded to those hard words I used about her.”

“She has made you feel them, I’ll promise you!” said Newman.

“It’s my conscience that makes me feel them.”

“Your conscience seems to me to be rather mixed!” exclaimed Newman, passionately.

“It has been in great trouble, but now it is very clear,” said Madame de Cintre.  “I don’t give you up for any worldly advantage or for any worldly happiness.”

“Oh, you don’t give me up for Lord Deepmere, I know,” said Newman.  “I won’t pretend, even to provoke you, that I think that.  But that’s what your mother and your brother wanted, and your mother, at that villainous ball of hers—­I liked it at the time, but the very thought of it now makes me rabid—­tried to push him on to make up to you.”

“Who told you this?” said Madame de Cintre softly.

“Not Valentin.  I observed it.  I guessed it.  I didn’t know at the time that I was observing it, but it stuck in my memory.  And afterwards, you recollect, I saw Lord Deepmere with you in the conservatory.  You said then that you would tell me at another time what he had said to you.”