"I _did?_" he gasped, in slow surprise. "Why, what have I--"

"I'll tell you what you did," the woman blazed out, standing so close
to him now that he felt her fierce breath on his face. "Shortly before
you left you were taken sick at the bank, or fainted, or something
like it, and didn't even tell me about it. I read it in the paper. I
was beneath your high-and-mighty notice--dirt under your feet. But the
next day you went driving with Irene Mitchell. You passed within ten
feet of me at the crossing of Whitehall Street and Marietta. You saw
me as plainly as you see me now, and yet you turned your head away.
You thought"--here an actual oath escaped the girl's lips--"you were
afraid of what that stuck-up fool of a woman would think. She knows
about us--she's heard; she recognized me. I saw it in her eyes. She
deliberately sneered at me, and you--_you contemptible puppy!_--you
didn't even raise your hat to me after all your sickening, gushing
protestations. I want to tell you right now, Dick Mostyn, that you
can't walk over me. I'm ready for you, and I'm tired of this whole
business."

He was wisely silent. She was pale and quivering all over. He wondered
how he could ever have thought her attractive or pretty. Her face was
as repulsive as death could have made it. Aimlessly she picked up a
cigarette only to crush it in her fingers as she went on.

"Answer me, Dick Mostyn, why did you treat me that way?"

"My fainting at the bank was nothing," he faltered. "I didn't think it
was of enough importance to mention, and as for my not speaking to you
on the street, you know that you and I have positively agreed that our
relations were to be unknown. People have talked about us so much,