He puffed at his cigar for a few minutes complacently.

“You profess to hate me,”—­he went on—­“Again I ask, why?  You tell your aunt that you want to be ‘loved.’  You consider love the only lasting good of life.  Well, you have your desire. I love you!”

She raised her eyes,—­and then suddenly laughed.

“You!” she said—­“You ‘love’ me?  It must be a very piecemeal sort of love, then, for I know at least five women to whom you have said the same thing!”

He was in nowise disconcerted.

“Only five!” he murmured lazily—­“Why not ten—­or twenty?  The more the merrier!  Women delight in bragging of conquests they have never made, as why should they not?  Lying comes so naturally to them!  But I do not profess to be a saint,—­I daresay I have said ‘I love you’ to a hundred women in a certain fashion,—­but not as I say it to you.  When I say it to you, I mean it.”

“Mean what?” she asked.

“Love.”

She stopped in her walk and faced him.

“When a man loves a woman—­really loves her,”—­she said, “Does he persecute her?  Does he compromise her in society?  Does he try to scandalise her among her friends?  Does he whisper her name away on a false rumour, and accuse her of running after him for his title, while all the time he knows it is he himself that is running after her money?  Does he make her life a misery to her, and leave her no peace anywhere, not even in her own house?  Does he spy upon her, and set others to do the same?—­does he listen at doors and interrogate servants as to her movements—­and does he altogether play the dastardly traitor to prove his ’love’?”

Her voice shook—­her eyes were ablaze with indignation.  Roxmouth flicked a little ash off his cigar.

“Why, of course not!” he replied—­“But who does these dreadful things?  Are they done at all except in your imagination?”

“You do them!” said Maryllia, passionately—­“And you have always done them!  When I tell you once and for all that I have given up every chance I ever had of being my aunt’s heiress—­that I shall never be a rich woman,—­and that I would far rather die a beggar than be your wife, will you not understand me?—­will you not leave me alone?”

He looked at her with quizzical amusement.

“Do you really want to be left alone?” he asked—­“Or in a ’solitude a deux’—­with the parson?”

She was silent, though her silence cost her an effort.  But she knew that the least word she might say concerning Walden would be wilfully misconstrued.  She knew that Roxmouth was waiting for her to burst out with some indignant denial of his suggestions—­something that he might twist and turn in his own fashion and repeat afterwards to all his and her acquaintances.  She cared nothing for herself, but she was full of dread lest Walden’s name should be bandied up and down on the scurrilous tongues of that ‘upper class’ throng, who, because they spend their lives in nothing nobler than political intrigue and sensual indulgence, are politely set aside as froth and scum by the saner, cleaner world, and classified as the ‘Smart Set.’  Roxmouth watched her furtively.  His clear-cut face, white skin and sandy hair shone all together with an oily lustre in the moonlight;—­there was a hard cold gleam in his eyes.