“Oh, yes!” he returned miserably.  “Oh, yes!”

“I have a whole series of the most complicated emotions about you,” she said, “only a lot of them are unexploded, like fire crackers before they are touched off.  If I lost all my money I’d be in a panic till you came and took me; but as long as I have it I don’t think of you more than once a week.  Yet, do you know, Frank, if you got a sweetheart, I believe I’d scratch her eyes out.  It’s rather fine of me to tell you all that,” she went on, with a smile, “for I’m giving you the key of the combination, and you might take advantage of it!”

“Florence,” he said, “I thought at first you were just laughing at me, but I see that you are right.  You are heartless.  You oughtn’t to talk like that.”

She looked a shade put out.

“Well, Frank, it’s the truth, anyway,” she said, “and in the old days we were always such sticklers for the truth—­for sincerity, you know—­weren’t we?”

“I have no business to correct you,” he said humbly.  “I resigned all my pretensions that morning in the old house.”

“Well, so long as you love me still!” she exclaimed, with a little mocking laugh.  “That’s the great thing, isn’t it?  I mean for me, of course.  I am greedy for love.  It makes me feel so safe and comfortable to think there are whole rows of men that love me.  When you have a great fortune you begin to appreciate the things that money cannot buy.”

“Oh, your money!” he said.  That word in her mouth always stung him.

“Well, you ought to hate my money,” she remarked cheerfully.  “It queered you, didn’t it?  And then all rich people are detestable, anyway—­selfish to the core, and horrid.  Do you know that sometimes when I have flirted awfully with a man at a dinner or somewhere, and the next day he telephones—­and the telephone is in the next room—­I’ve just said:  ‘Oh, bother! tell him I’m out,’ rather than take the trouble to get up from my chair.  And a nice man, too!”

“I thought I might be treated the same way,” he said.

“Then you thought wrong, Frank,” she returned, with a sudden change from her tone of flippancy and lightness.  “I haven’t sunk quite as low as that, you know.  I meant other people—­I didn’t mean you, Frank, dear.”

This was said with such a little ring of kindness that Frank was moved.

“Then the old days still count for something?” he said.

“Oh, yes!” she said.

“But not enough to hurt?” he ventured.

“Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t,” she returned.  “It depends on how good a time I’m having.  But I hate to think I’m weak and selfish and vain, and that the only person I really care for is myself.  I value my self-esteem, and it often gets an awful jar.  Sometimes I feel like a girl that has run away from home—­ diamonds and dyed hair, you know—­and then wakes up at night and cries to think of what a price she has paid for all her fine things!” Florence waved her hand towards the alabaster statue of Pocahontas, with a little ripple of self-disdain.  She was in a strange humour, and beneath the surface of her apparent gaiety there ran an undercurrent of bitterness and contempt for herself.  Her eyes were unusually brilliant, and her cheeks were pink enough to have been rouged.  The sight of her old lover had stirred many memories in her bosom.