If she had not had blood and fire in her veins, she might have found it easy to answer calmly.  But she had both, and both leaped and beat furiously for a few seconds.  It was only human that it should be so.  But she was more than a passionate girl of high and trenchant spirit, and she had learned, even in the days at the French school, what he had never been able to learn in his life—­self-control.  She held herself in as she would have held in a horse of too great fire and action.  She was actually able to look—­as the first Reuben Vanderpoel would have looked—­at her capital of resource.  But it meant taut holding of the reins.

“Will you tell me,” she said, stopping, “what it is you want?”

“I want to talk to you.  I want to tell you truths you would rather be told here than on the high road, where people are passing—­or at Stornham, where the servants would overhear and Rosalie be thrown into hysterics.  You will not run screaming across the marsh, because I should run screaming after you, and we should both look silly.  Here is a rather scraggy tree.  Will you sit on the mound near it—­for Rosalie’s sake?”

“I will not sit down,” replied Betty, “but I will listen, because it is not a bad idea that I should understand you.  But to begin with, I will tell you something.”  She stopped beneath the tree and stood with her back against its trunk.  “I pick up things by noticing people closely, and I have realised that all your life you have counted upon getting your own way because you saw that people—­especially women—­have a horror of public scenes, and will submit to almost anything to avoid them.  That is true very often, but not always.”

Her eyes, which were well opened, were quite the blue of steel, and rested directly upon him.  “I, for instance, would let you make a scene with me anywhere you chose—­in Bond Street—­in Piccadilly—­on the steps of Buckingham Palace, as I was getting out of my carriage to attend a drawing-room—­and you would gain nothing you wanted by it—­nothing.  You may place entire confidence in that statement.”

He stared back at her, momentarily half-magnetised, and then broke forth into a harsh half-laugh.

“You are so damned handsome that nothing else matters.  I’m hanged if it does!” and the words were an exclamation.  He drew still nearer to her, speaking with a sort of savagery.  “Cannot you see that you could do what you pleased with me?  You are too magnificent a thing for a man to withstand.  I have lost my head and gone to the devil through you.  That is what I came to say.”

In the few seconds of silence that followed, his breath came quickly again and he was even paler than before.

“You came to me to say that?” asked Betty.

“Yes—­to say it before you drove me to other things.”

Her gaze was for a moment even slightly wondering.  He presented the curious picture of a cynical man of the world, for the time being ruled and impelled only by the most primitive instincts.  To a clear-headed modern young woman of the most powerful class, he—­her sister’s husband—­was making threatening love as if he were a savage chief and she a savage beauty of his tribe.  All that concerned him was that he should speak and she should hear—­that he should show her he was the stronger of the two.