Blake on that same score, but that in that moment Wilding spoke again.

"Reluctant to do what?" he questioned amiably, looking Westmacott
so straightly between the eyes that the boy shifted uneasily on his
high-backed chair.

Nevertheless, still full of confidence in the unassailability of his
position, the mad youth answered, "To cleanse yourself of what I threw
at you."

"Fan me, ye winds!" gasped Nick Trenchard, and looked with expectancy
at his friend Wilding.

Now there was one factor with which, in basing with such craven
shrewdness his calculations upon Mr. Wilding's feelings for his sister,
young Richard had not reckoned. He was not to know that Wilding,
bruised and wounded by Miss Westmacott's scorn of him, had reached
that borderland where love and hate are so merged that they are scarce
to be distinguished. Embittered by the slights she had put upon
him - slights which his sensitive, lover's fancy had magnified a
hundredfold - Anthony Wilding's frame of mind was grown peculiar.
Of his love she would have none; his kindness she seemingly despised.
So be it; she should taste his cruelty. If she scorned his wooing
and forbade him to pursue it, at least it was not hers to deny him
the power to hurt; and in hurting her that would not be loved by him
some measure of fierce and bitter consolation seemed to await him.

He realized, perhaps, not quite all this - and to the unworthiness
of it all he gave no thought. But he realized enough as he toyed, as
cat with mouse, with Richard Westmacott, to know that in striking at her