Did he imagine for a single instant that she would have come to London with him save on the understanding that she was to be married immediately upon arrival?  This attitude of an indignant question was not to be reconciled with her belief that his excuses for himself were truthful.  But she did not remark the discrepancy.

Her sarcasm wounded his vanity.

“Oh, very well!” he muttered.  “If you don’t choose to believe what I say!” He shrugged his shoulders.

She said nothing; but the sobs swept at intervals through her frame, shaking it.

Reading hesitation in her face, he tried again.  “Come along, little girl.  And wipe your eyes.”  And he approached her.  She stepped back.

“No, no!” she denied him, passionately.  He had esteemed her too cheaply.  And she did not care to be called ‘little girl.’

“Then what shall you do?” he inquired, in a tone which blended mockery and bullying.  She was making a fool of him.

“I can tell you what I shan’t do,” she said.  “I shan’t go to Paris.”  Her sobs were less frequent.

“That’s not my question,” he said icily.  “I want to know what you will do.”

There was now no pretence of affectionateness either on her part or on his.  They might, to judge from their attitudes, have been nourished from infancy on mutual hatred.

“What’s that got to do with you?” she demanded.

“It’s got everything to do with me,” he said.

“Well, you can go and find out!” she said.

It was girlish; it was childish; it was scarcely according to the canons for conducting a final rupture; but it was not the less tragically serious.  Indeed, the spectacle of this young girl absurdly behaving like one, in a serious crisis, increased the tragicalness of the situation even if it did not heighten it.  The idea that ran through Gerald’s brain was the ridiculous folly of having anything to do with young girls.  He was quite blind to her beauty.

“’Go’?” he repeated her word.  “You mean that?”

“Of course I mean it,” she answered promptly.

The coward in him urged him to take advantage of her ignorant, helpless pride, and leave her at her word.  He remembered the scene she had made at the pit shaft, and he said to himself that her charm was not worth her temper, and that he was a fool ever to have dreamed that it was, and that he would be doubly a fool now not to seize the opportunity of withdrawing from an insane enterprise.

“I am to go?” he asked, with a sneer.

She nodded.

“Of course if you order me to leave you, I must.  Can I do anything for you?”

She signified that he could not,

“Nothing?  You’re sure?”

She frowned.

“Well, then, good-bye.”  He turned towards the door.

“I suppose you’d leave me here without money or anything?” she said in a cold, cutting voice.  And her sneer was far more destructive than his.  It destroyed in him the last trace of compassion for her.