For Bonnibel stands listening in stunned silence to his vehement rhodomontade. She has walked away from him a little way, and stands clinging to the back of a chair, as if to save herself from falling. The angry flush has died out of her face, and she looks marble-cold, and white even to her lips. As he pauses, she speaks in low, resentful accents: "Colonel Carlyle, you are the first man who has ever offered me an insult!" "An insult!" he exclaims. "Do you call the truth an insult? You talk like a child and act like a child, Bonnibel. I see no other resource before me than to put you at school and keep you there until you learn the necessary amenities of social life which your uncle's blind indulgence aided and abetted you in ignoring." "Send _me_--a married woman--to school--like a child!" she says, staring at him blankly. "Why not? You are quite young enough yet," he answers, moodily. "Two years at a convent school in Paris would give you the training and finish you lack at present." "I assure you, sir, that my education has not been so totally neglected as your words imply," she answers from the depths of the arm-chair into which she has wearily fallen. "My Uncle Francis, though he loved me too well to send me away from him to school, always provided me with competent governesses, and if my training does not do them credit it is my own fault, not his; so I beg that you will not needlessly reflect on his memory." He was silent a moment, pacing restlessly up and down the floor. An unconscious pathos in her words had stung him into reflection. "My Uncle Francis loved me too well to send me away from him," has touched a responsive chord in his own heart. Her uncle had loved her like that, yet he, her husband, bound to her by the dearest tie on earth, could talk of sending her away from him like a naughty child that, having disobeyed, must be punished for its fault. "_Could_ I do it?" he asked himself, suddenly. "I love her as my own life, though her childish follies drive me mad with jealousy. I am growing old--could I lose her out of my life two precious years when my span of existence may be so short? No, no, fool that I was to threaten her so; I will retract it if I can without compromising my dignity." He paused before her and said abruptly: "I understand from your words then, Bonnibel, that you refuse your consent to my proposed plan?" To his surprise and confusion she lifted her head with a proud, stag-like motion, and said icily: "_Au contraire_, sir, I think well of it, and fully agree with you that I need more training and polish to fit me for the exalted position I occupy as your wife!" The fine, delicate irony of her tone could not fail to strike him keenly. He tried to ignore it as he said in a voice that betrayed nothing of his conflicting emotions: "My proposed course meets with your full approval, then, madam?" She inclines her head with stately grace.