“Yes, thank you—­at least, it doesn’t matter.”

He had to relinquish her hand, and when she immediately made towards the bell-button, he followed and arrested her.

“Let us have our talk first,” he pleaded.  “I don’t want anything to eat until I know—­until I feel that you don’t grudge it.”

“Oh, I don’t grudge it,” she took him literally.  “Not one square meal, at any rate.  The only thing I am obliged to grudge is house-room—­for any length of time—­to single gentlemen.  But that is not a question of hospitality, as you know.  Sit down, and tell me all the news.”

He sat down; she also—­about two yards off.  Across the gulf of Persian rug he looked at her steadily.

“You are angry with me,” he observed.  “Why, Debbie?  Is it still the old quarrel—­after all these years?”

Then her face changed like a filled lamp when you put a match to it.  She said, in a deep, breathless way: 

“Do you know how many years it is?”

More in sorrow and surprise than in anger, he guessed her meaning after a moment’s thought.

“Is that my fault?  The number of years has been of your choosing,” he pointed out forbearingly.  “You sent me away, when I never wanted to go.  You broke it off, altogether against my wish.  You never relented—­ never made a sign.  Even now I come back uninvited.”

It was a clear case, and all he asked for was bare justice.

“Why didn’t you come before—­uninvited?  Why didn’t you come back to me when I was poor and lonely?  Claud, I have been in every sort of trouble—­my father is dead, I have lost all my sisters in one way and another, I have been living in cheap lodgings, doing without what I always thought were the necessaries of life, to keep Francie going and to get debts paid off—­I have been ill, I have been unhappy, I have sometimes been penniless, and you have carefully passed by on the other side, like that man in the Bible, and left me to my fate.”

He was genuinely shocked.  He knew that she had been horribly down in the world, but not that she had suffered to this extent.  Seeing her sitting there in her beautiful gown, in her beautiful room, without one trace of those sordid years about her, his heart ached to think of them.

“My darling, I never knew—­” “Why not?” she said swiftly.  “Because you never tried to know—­never cared to know.  But now that I can be a credit to you again—­the moment you hear that I have had a great fortune left to me—­now you come back.”

“Do you mean to say,” he demanded sternly, “that you think—­you honestly think I have come back to you on account of your money?”

She returned his cold, searching gaze in kind.

“Honestly,” she said, “I do think so.  There is no way out of it.”

He rose deliberately, bowed to her, and picked up his hat.  He was not really mercenary—­or, if he was, he did not know it—­and he was as intensely proud as she was.  He felt that he had received the deadliest insult ever dealt him in his life, and one that he could never forget or forgive.