Beaton frowned.  “Why do I come so much?”

“Yes.”

“Why do I—­Excuse me, Mrs. Mandel, but will you allow me to ask why you ask?”

“Oh, certainly.  There’s no reason why I shouldn’t say, for I wish you to be very frank with me.  I ask because there are two young ladies in this house; and, in a certain way, I have to take the place of a mother to them.  I needn’t explain why; you know all the people here, and you understand.  I have nothing to say about them, but I should not be speaking to you now if they were not all rather helpless people.  They do not know the world they have come to live in here, and they cannot help themselves or one another.  But you do know it, Mr. Beaton, and I am sure you know just how much or how little you mean by coming here.  You are either interested in one of these young girls or you are not.  If you are, I have nothing more to say.  If you are not—­” Mrs. Mandel continued to smile, but the smile had grown more perfunctory, and it had an icy gleam.

Beaton looked at her with surprise that he gravely kept to himself.  He had always regarded her as a social nullity, with a kind of pity, to be sure, as a civilized person living among such people as the Dryfooses, but not without a humorous contempt; he had thought of her as Mandel, and sometimes as Old Mandel, though she was not half a score of years his senior, and was still well on the sunny side of forty.  He reddened, and then turned an angry pallor.  “Excuse me again, Mrs. Mandel.  Do you ask this from the young ladies?”

“Certainly not,” she said, with the best temper, and with something in her tone that convicted Beaton of vulgarity, in putting his question of her authority in the form of a sneer.  “As I have suggested, they would hardly know how to help themselves at all in such a matter.  I have no objection to saying that I ask it from the father of the young ladies.  Of course, in and for myself I should have no right to know anything about your affairs.  I assure you the duty of knowing isn’t very pleasant.”  The little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as something rather nice.

“I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel,” he said, with a dreamy sadness in his own.  He lifted his eyes and looked into hers.  “If I told you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?”

“Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly leading them on to infer differently.”  They both mechanically kept up the fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no doubt in the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant.  A good many thoughts went through Beaton’s mind, and none of them were flattering.  He had not been unconscious that the part he had played toward this girl was ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy which her beauty had at first kindled in him had grown cooler.  He was aware that of late he had been amusing himself with her passion in a way that was not less than cruel, not because he wished to do so, but because he was listless and wished nothing.  He rose in saying:  “I might be a little more lenient than you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won’t trouble you with any palliating theory.  I will not come any more.”