‘A letter I received from her’ he said, with assumed coldness, ‘tells me clearly enough what Miss Graye’s mind is.’

’You think she still loves you?  O yes, of course you do—­all men are like that.’

‘I have reason to.’  He could feign no further than the first speech.

‘I should be interested in knowing what reason?’ she said, with sarcastic archness.

Edward felt he was allowing her to do, in fractional parts, what he rebelled against when regarding it as a whole; but the fact that his antagonist had the presence of a queen, and features only in the early evening of their beauty, was not without its influence upon a keenly conscious man.  Her bearing had charmed him into toleration, as Mary Stuart’s charmed the indignant Puritan visitors.  He again answered her honestly.

‘The best of reasons—­the tone of her letter.’

‘Pooh, Mr. Springrove!’

’Not at all, Miss Aldclyffe!  Miss Graye desired that we should be strangers to each other for the simple practical reason that intimacy could only make wretched complications worse, not from lack of love—­love is only suppressed.’

’Don’t you know yet, that in thus putting aside a man, a woman’s pity for the pain she inflicts gives her a kindness of tone which is often mistaken for suppressed love?’ said Miss Aldclyffe, with soft insidiousness.

This was a translation of the ambiguity of Cytherea’s tone which he had certainly never thought of; and he was too ingenuous not to own it.

‘I had never thought of it,’ he said.

‘And don’t believe it?’

‘Not unless there was some other evidence to support the view.’

She paused a minute and then began hesitatingly—­

’My intention was—­what I did not dream of owning to you—­my intention was to try to induce you to fulfil your promise to Miss Hinton not solely on her account and yours (though partly).  I love Cytherea Graye with all my soul, and I want to see her happy even more than I do you.  I did not mean to drag her name into the affair at all, but I am driven to say that she wrote that letter of dismissal to you—­for it was a most pronounced dismissal—­not on account of your engagement.  She is old enough to know that engagements can be broken as easily as they can be made.  She wrote it because she loved another man; very suddenly, and not with any idea or hope of marrying him, but none the less deeply.’

‘Who?’

‘Mr. Manston.’

’Good—!  I can’t listen to you for an instant, madam; why, she hadn’t seen him!’

’She had; he came here the day before she wrote to you; and I could prove to you, if it were worth while, that on that day she went voluntarily to his house, though not artfully or blamably; stayed for two hours playing and singing; that no sooner did she leave him than she went straight home, and wrote the letter saying she should not see you again, entirely because she had seen him and fallen desperately in love with him—­a perfectly natural thing for a young girl to do, considering that he’s the handsomest man in the county.  Why else should she not have written to you before?’