“Would you talk to me so, if you thought otherwise?” she asked.

“I think I would,” said Percy.  “A little depends upon the person.  Are you pledged at all to Mr. Edward Blancove?”

“Do you suppose me one to pledge myself?”

“He is doing a base thing.”

“Then, Percy, let an assurance of my knowledge of that be my answer.”

“You do not love the man?”

Despise him, say!”

“Is he aware of it?”

“If clear writing can make him.”

“You have told him as much?”

“To his apprehension, certainly.”

“Further, Margaret, I must speak:—­did he act with your concurrence, or knowledge of it at all, in acting as he has done?”

“Heavens!  Percy, you question me like a husband.”

“It is what I mean to be, if I may.”

The frame of the fair lady quivered as from a blow, and then her eyes rose tenderly.

“I thought you knew me.  This is not possible.”

“You will not be mine?  Why is it not possible?”

“I think I could say, because I respect you too much.”

“Because you find you have not the courage?”

“For what?”

“To confess that you were under bad influence, and were not the Margaret I can make of you.  Put that aside.  If you remain as you are, think of the snares.  If you marry one you despise, look at the pit.  Yes; you will be mine!  Half my love of my country and my profession is love of you.  Margaret is fire in my blood.  I used to pray for opportunities, that Margaret might hear of me.  I knew that gallant actions touched her; I would have fallen gladly; I was sure her heart would leap when she heard of me.  Let it beat against mine.  Speak!”

“I will,” said Mrs. Lovell, and she suppressed the throbs of her bosom. 
Her voice was harsh and her face bloodless.  “How much money have you,
Percy?”

This sudden sluicing of cold water on his heat of passion petrified him.

“Money,” he said, with a strange frigid scrutiny of her features.  As in the flash of a mirror, he beheld her bony, worn, sordid, unacceptable.  But he was fain to admit it to be an eminently proper demand for enlightenment.

He said deliberately, “I possess an income of five hundred a year, extraneous, and in addition to my pay as major in Her Majesty’s service.”

Then he paused, and the silence was like a growing chasm between them.

She broke it by saying, “Have you any expectations?”

This was crueller still, though no longer astonishing.  He complained in his heart merely that her voice had become so unpleasant.

With emotionless precision, he replied, “At my mother’s death—­”

She interposed a soft exclamation.

“At my mother’s death there will come to me by reversion, five or six thousand pounds.  When my father dies, he may possibly bequeath his property to me.  On that I cannot count.”