the time the Exchange opens in the morning until he gets home at night and wants his dinner.  You don’t love him—­it would be a miracle if a woman with any spirit did.  He hasn’t any more of an idea of what he possesses by legal right than the man I discovered driving in a cart one of the best hunters I ever had in my stables.  To say that he doesn’t appreciate you is a ludicrous understatement.  Any woman would have done for him.”

“Please don’t!” she implored him.  “Please don’t!”

But for the moment she knew that she was powerless, carried along like a chip on the crest of his passion.

“I don’t pretend to say how it is, or why it is,” he went on, paying no heed to her protests.  “I suppose there’s one woman for every man in the world—­though I didn’t use to think so.  I always had another idea of woman before I met you.  I’ve thought I was in love with ’em, but now I understand it was only—­something else.  I say, I don’t know what it is in you that makes me feel differently.  I can’t analyze it, and I don’t want to.  You’re not perfect, by a good deal, and God knows I’m not.  You’re ambitious, but if you weren’t, you’d be humdrum—­yet there’s no pitiful artifice in you as in other women that any idiot can see through.  And it would have paralyzed forever any ordinary woman to have married Howard Spence.”

A new method of wooing, surely, and evidently peculiar to Trixton Brent.  Honora, in the prey of emotions which he had aroused in spite of her, needless to say did not, at that moment, perceive the humour in it.  His words gave her food for thought for many months afterwards.

The lion was indeed aroused at last, and whip or goad or wile of no avail.  There came a time when she no longer knew what he was saying:  when speech, though eloquent and forceful, seemed a useless medium.  Her appeals were lost, and she found herself fighting in his arms, when suddenly they turned into one of the crowded arteries of Harlem.  She made a supreme effort of will, and he released her.

“Oh!” she cried, trembling.

But he looked at her, unrepentant, with the light of triumph in his eyes.

“I’ll never forgive you!” she exclaimed, breathless.

“I gloried in it,” he replied.  “I shall remember it as long as I live, and I’ll do it again.”

She did not answer him.  She dropped her veil, and for a long space was silent while they rapidly threaded the traffic, and at length turned into upper Fifth Avenue, skirting the Park.  She did not so much as glance at him.  But he seemed content to watch her veiled profile in the dusk.

Her breath, in the first tumult of her thought, came and went deeply.  But gradually as the street lights burned brighter and familiar sights began to appear, she grew more controlled and became capable of reflection.  She remembered that there was a train for Quicksands at seven-fifteen, which Howard had taken once or twice.  But she felt that the interval was too short.  In that brief period she could not calm herself sufficiently to face her guests.  Indeed, the notion of appearing alone, or with Brent, at that dinner-party, appalled her.  And suddenly an idea presented itself.