your affairs. I assure you the duty of knowing isn't very pleasant." The
little tremor in her clear voice struck Beaton as something rather nice.

"I can very well believe that, Mrs. Mandel," he said, with a dreamy
sadness in his own. He lifted his eyes and looked into hers. "If I told
you that I cared nothing about them in the way you intimate?"

"Then I should prefer to let you characterize your own conduct in
continuing to come here for the year past, as you have done, and tacitly
leading them on to infer differently." They both mechanically kept up the
fiction of plurality in speaking of Christine, but there was no doubt in
the mind of either which of the young ladies the other meant. A good many
thoughts went through Beaton's mind, and none of them were flattering. He
had not been unconscious that the part he had played toward this girl was
ignoble, and that it had grown meaner as the fancy which her beauty had
at first kindled in him had grown cooler. He was aware that of late he
had been amusing himself with her passion in a way that was not less than
cruel, not because he wished to do so, but because he was listless and
wished nothing. He rose in saying: "I might be a little more lenient than
you think, Mrs. Mandel; but I won't trouble you with any palliating
theory. I will not come any more."

He bowed, and Mrs. Mandel said, "Of course, it's only your action that I
am concerned with."

She seemed to him merely triumphant, and he could not conceive what it
had cost her to nerve herself up to her too easy victory. He left Mrs.
Mandel to a far harder lot than had fallen to him, and he went away
hating her as an enemy who had humiliated him at a moment when he
particularly needed exalting. It was really very simple for him to stop