“Do you know,” he said at length, “that you produce an extraordinary effect upon me, Betty?”

She was occupying herself by adding a few stitches to one of Rosy’s ancient strips of embroidery, and as she answered, she laid it flat upon her knee to consider its effect.

“Good or bad?” she inquired, with delicate abstraction.

He turned his face towards her again—­this time quickly.

“Both,” he answered.  “Both.”

His tone held the flash of a heat which he felt should have startled her slightly.  But apparently it did not.

“I do not like ‘both,’” with composed lightness.  “If you had said that you felt yourself develop angelic qualities when you were near me, I should feel flattered, and swell with pride.  But ‘both’ leaves me unsatisfied.  It interferes with the happy little conceit that one is an all-pervading, beneficent power.  One likes to contemplate a large picture of one’s self—­not plain, but coloured—­as a wholesale reformer.”

“I see.  Thank you,” stiffly and flushing.  “You do not believe me.”

Her effect upon him was such that, for the moment, he found himself choosing to believe that he was in earnest.  His desire to impress her with his mood had actually led to this result.  She ought to have been rather moved—­a little fluttered, perhaps, at hearing that she disturbed his equilibrium.

“You set yourself against me, as a child, Betty,” he said.  “And you set yourself against me now.  You will not give me fair play.  You might give me fair play.”  He dropped his voice at the last sentence, and knew it was well done.  A touch of hopelessness is not often lost on a woman.

“What would you consider fair play?” she inquired.

“It would be fair to listen to me without prejudice—­to let me explain how it has happened that I have appeared to you a—­a blackguard—­I have no doubt you would call it—­and a fool.”  He threw out his hand in an impatient gesture—­impatient of himself—­his fate—­the tricks of bad fortune which it implied had made of him a more erring mortal than he would have been if left to himself, and treated decently.

“Do not put it so strongly,” with conservative politeness.

“I don’t refuse to admit that I am handicapped by a devil of a temperament.  That is an inherited thing.”

“Ah!” said Betty.  “One of the temperaments one reads about—­for which no one is to be blamed but one’s deceased relatives.  After all, that is comparatively easy to deal with.  One can just go on doing what one wants to do—­and then condemn one’s grandparents severely.”

A repellent quality in her—­which had also the trick of transforming itself into an exasperating attraction—­was that she deprived him of the luxury he had been most tenacious of throughout his existence.  If the injustice of fate has failed to bestow upon a man fortune, good looks or brilliance, his exercise of the power to disturb, to enrage those who dare not resent, to wound and take the nonsense out of those about him, will, at all events, preclude the possibility of his being passed over as a factor not to be considered.  If to charm and bestow gives the sense of power, to thwart and humiliate may be found not wholly unsatisfying.