She laughed again, Routh felt unspeakably embarrassed; he had a sense of being at a disadvantage, which was unpleasant. She saw it, and said: "What a temper you have! You'd be rather hard to please, I fancy, if one were in any sense bound to try." "Don't jest with me," said Routh, suddenly and sternly, and he rolled his chair deliberately near her as he spoke. "You did not allow me, you did not invite me to come here to-night; you did not do this, which seems so 'simple' to you, because you are as much braver than every other woman as you are more beautiful,"--he looked into her dark eyes, and their lids did not droop,--"only to jest with me, only to trifle with me, as you trifle with others. You are a wonderfully puzzling woman, I acknowledge; no woman ever so puzzled me before. Each time I see you, there is something different, something new in your manner, and each time it is as though I had to begin all over again; as if I had not told you that I love you, as if you had not listened and confessed that you know it. Why have you sent for me? You dismissed me yesterday with something which you tried to make look and sound like anger--ineffectually, for you were not angry. And I was prepared for the same line of tactics to-day. Well, you send for me. I am here. You come to me a thousand times more beautiful"--he dropped his voice to a whisper, and she grew pale under the fixed fire of his eyes,--"infinitely more beautiful than I have ever seen you; and in your eyes and in your smile there is what I have never seen in them; and yet you meet me with mere jesting words. Now, this you do not mean; what is it that you _do_ mean?" He rose, and leaned against the mantelpiece, looking down upon her bent head, with the light shining on the jewels in her hair. She did not speak. "What is that you _do_ mean?" he repeated. She had laid one arm along the cushioned side of the sofa, the side near him. He clasped it, above the wrist, impressively, not caressingly, and at the touch, the words he had spoken to her before, "Would you not be afraid of a man who loved you with all the passion of his heart?" recurred to her, and she felt that so this man loved her, and that she was afraid of him. "I dare say many others have loved you, and told you so," he continued, "and I don't ask you how you received their professions. I know the world too well, and what it brings to men and women, for any such folly. That is of the past. The present is ours. I ask you why you have brought me here? A woman who resents such words as those I have spoken to you before now, does not give a man the chance of repeating them. You have not sent for me to tell me that you are insulted and outraged, to talk the cant of a hypocritical society to me. I should not love you, beautiful as you are, if you were such a fool."