She made no reply.  At the door she said to the carriage-caller: 

“A cab, please—­no, a hansom.”

The hansom drove up; its doors opened.  Craig pushed aside the carriage man, lifted her in with a powerful upward swing of his arm against her elbow and side—­so powerful that she fell into the seat, knocking her hat awry and loosening her veil from the brim so that it hung down distressfully across her eyes and nose.  “Drive up Fifth Avenue to the Park,” said Craig, seating himself beside her.  “Now, please don’t cry,” he said to her.

“Cry?” she exclaimed.  Her dry, burning eyes blazed at him.

“Your eyes were so bright,” laughed he, “that I thought they were full of tears.”

“If you are a gentleman you will leave this hansom at once.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said he.  “You know perfectly well I’ll not leave.  You know perfectly well I’ll say what I’ve got to say to you, and that no power on earth can prevent me.  That’s why you didn’t give way to your impulse to make a scene when I followed you into this trap.”

She was busy with her hat and veil.

“Can I help you?” said he with a great show of politeness that was ridiculously out of harmony with him in every way.  That, and the absurdity of Josh Craig, of all men, helping a woman in the delicate task of adjusting a hat and veil, struck her as so ludicrous that she laughed hysterically; her effort to make the laughter appear an outburst of derisive, withering scorn was not exactly a triumph.

“Well,” she presently said, “what is it you wish to say?  I have very little time.”

He eyed her sharply.  “You think you dislike me, don’t you?” said he.

“I do,” replied she, her tone as cutting as her words were curt.

“How little that amounts to!  All human beings—­Grant, you, I, all of us, everybody—­are brimful of vanity.  It slops over a little one way and we call it like.  It slops over the other way and we call it dislike—­hate—­loathing—­according to the size of the slop.  Now, I’m not here to deal with vanity, but with good sense.  Has it occurred to you in the last few days that you and I have got to get married, whether we will or no?”

“It has not,” she cried with frantic fury of human being cornered by an ugly truth.

“Oh, yes, it has.  For you are a sensible woman—­entirely too sensible for a woman, unless she marries an unusual man like me.”

“Is that a jest?” she inquired in feeble attempt at sarcasm.

“Don’t you know I have no sense of humor?  Would I do the things I do and carry them through if I had?”

In spite of herself she admired this penetration of self-analysis.  In spite of herself the personality beneath his surface, the personality that had a certain uncanny charm for her, was subtly reasserting its inexplicable fascination.

“Yes, we’ve got to marry,” proceeded he.  “I have to marry you because I can’t afford to let you say you jilted me.  That would make me the laughing-stock of my State; and I can’t afford to tell the truth that I jilted you because the people would despise me as no gentleman.  And, while I don’t in the least mind being despised as no gentleman by fashionable noddle-heads or by those I trample on to rise, I do mind it when it would ruin me with the people.”