You are free of the best houses in England.
Are you something besides all this? Are you a coward and a scoundrel as
well?"
He started--opened his lips to speak--checked himself--and made an
uneasy attempt to laugh it off. "Come!" he said, "keep your temper."
The suppressed passion in her began to force its way to the surface.
"Keep my temper?" she repeated. "Do _you_ of all men expect me to
control myself? What a memory yours must be! Have you forgotten the time
when I was fool enough to think you were fond of me? and mad enough to
believe you could keep a promise?"
He persisted in trying to laugh it off. "Mad is a strongish word to use,
Miss Silvester!"
"Mad is the right word! I look back at my own infatuation--and I can't
account for it; I can't understand myself. What was there in _you_,"
she asked, with an outbreak of contemptuous surprise, "to attract such a
woman as I am?"
His inexhaustible good-nature was proof even against this. He put his
hands in his pockets, and said, "I'm sure I don't know."
She turned away from him. The frank brutality of the answer had not
offended her. It forced her, cruelly forced her, to remember that she
had nobody but herself to blame for the position in which she stood at
that moment.
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