“Yes, Beatrice, I have.  I have thought it over, and I think that—­forgive me again—­that if you can bring yourself to it, perhaps you had better marry him.  He is not such a bad sort of man, and he is well off.”

They had been walking rapidly, and now they were reaching the spot known as the “Amphitheatre,” that same spot where Owen Davies had proposed to Beatrice some seven months before.

Beatrice passed round the projecting edge of rock, and walked some way towards the flat slab of stone in the centre before she answered.  While she did so a great and bitter anger filled her heart.  She saw, or thought she saw, it all.  Geoffrey wished to be rid of her.  He had discerned an element of danger in their intimacy, and was anxious to make that intimacy impossible by pushing her into a hateful marriage.  Suddenly she turned and faced him—­turned like a thing at bay.  The last red rays of the sunset struck upon her lovely face made more lovely still by its stamp of haughty anger:  they lay upon her heaving breast.  Full in the eyes she looked him with those wide angry eyes of hers—­never before had he seen her so imperial a mien.  Her dignity and the power of her presence literally awed him, for at times Beatrice’s beauty was of that royal stamp which when it hides a heart, is a compelling force, conquering and born to conquer.

“Does it not strike you, Mr. Bingham,” she said quietly, “that you are taking a very great liberty?  Does it not strike you that no man who is not a relation has any right to speak to a woman as you have spoken to me?—­that, in short, you have been guilty of what in most people would be an impertinence?  What right have you to dictate to me as to whom I should or should not marry?  Surely of all things in the world that is my own affair.”

Geoffrey coloured to the eyes.  As would have been the case with most men of his class, he felt her accusation of having taken a liberty, of having presumed upon an intimacy, more keenly than any which she could have brought against him.

“Forgive me,” he said humbly.  “I can only assure you that I had no such intention.  I only spoke—­ill-judgedly, I fear—­because—­because I felt driven to it.”

Beatrice took no notice of his words, but went on in the same cold voice.

“What right have you to speak of my affairs with Mr. Davies, with an old boatman, or even with my father?  Had I wished you to do so I should have asked you.  By what authority do you constitute yourself an intermediary for the purpose of bringing about a marriage which you are so good as to consider would be to my pecuniary interest?  Do you not know that such a matter is one which the woman concerned, the woman whose happiness and self-respect are at stake, alone can judge of?  I have nothing more to say except this.  I said just now that you had been guilty of what would in most people be an impertinence.  Well, I will add something.  In this case, Mr. Bingham, there are circumstances which make it—­a cruel insult!”