He dropped into a chair before her with his broad heavy hands upon his knees, and looked at her with an equal, though baser, contempt:  for his was mingled with a certain pride of mastery and possession.

“And, of course, you’ll go to Hymettus and cut a splurge as you always do.  The beautiful Mrs. Horncastle!  The helpless victim of a wretched, dissipated, disgraced, gambling husband.  So dreadfully sad, you know, and so interesting!  Could get a divorce from the brute if she wanted, but won’t, on account of her religious scruples.  And so while the brute is gambling, swindling, disgracing himself, and dodging a shot here and a lynch committee there, two or three hundred miles away, you’re splurging round in first-class hotels and watering-places, doing the injured and abused, and run after by a lot of men who are ready to take my place, and, maybe, some of my reputation along with it.”

“Stop!” she said suddenly, in a voice that made the glass chandelier ring.  He had risen too, with a quick, uneasy glance towards the door.  But her outbreak passed as suddenly, and sinking back into her chair, she said, with her previous scornful resignation, “Never mind.  Go on.  You know you’re lying!”

He sat down again and looked at her critically.  “Yes, as far as you’re concerned I was lying!  I know your style.  But as you know, too, that I’d kill you and the first man I suspected, and there ain’t a judge or a jury in all Californy that wouldn’t let me go free for it, and even consider, too, that it had wiped off the whole slate agin me—­it’s to my credit!”

“I know what you men call chivalry,” she said coldly, “but I did not come here to buy a knowledge of that.  So now about the child?” she ended abruptly, leaning forward again with the same look of eager solicitude in her eyes.

“Well, about the child—­our child—­though, perhaps, I prefer to say my child,” he began, with a certain brutal frankness.  “I’ll tell you.  But first, I don’t want you to talk about buying your information of me.  If I haven’t told you anything before, it’s because I didn’t think you oughter know.  If I didn’t trust the child to you, it’s because I didn’t think you could go shashaying about with a child that was three years old when I”—­he stopped and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—­“made an honest woman of you—­I think that’s what they call it.”

“But,” she said eagerly, ignoring the insult, “I could have hidden it where no one but myself would have known it.  I could have sent it to school and visited it as a relation.”

“Yes,” he said curtly, “like all women, and then blurted it out some day and made it worse.”

“But,” she said desperately, “even then, suppose I had been willing to take the shame of it!  I have taken more!”

“But I didn’t intend that you should,” he said roughly.

“You are very careful of my reputation,” she returned scornfully.