"Well, why?" asks Eugene, with a kind of obstinate candor. "I'm sure--flirting, indeed! Why, Marcia couldn't be an hour in the room with any fellow, young or old, that she wouldn't make big eyes at him. I like to see people turn saints at short notice. I'll go off and have it out with her myself, and make her keep a civil tongue in the future." "Eugene!" Violet cries, in distress, as he is half-way through the hall. Oh, what shall she do? Must she go wild with all this pain and shame? "Well," he ejaculates, again standing indecisively. "She said other things," and the dry lips move convulsively. "I must know; I cannot live with this horrible shadow over everything. There is no one else to ask." He comes and seats himself on the divan beside her, and there is a glimpse of Floyd in his face. His voice falls to a most persuasive inflection as he rejoins, "Tell me, ask me anything, and I will answer you truly. There has never been any horrible thing since you came here, or ever that I can remember. What did Marcia say?" Perhaps, after all, Marcia did not tell the exact truth, and Violet's despairing face lightens. Marcia may have Charles Lamb's way of thinking the truth too precious to be wasted upon everybody, for she is sometimes extremely economizing. And Violet _must_ know. "You will tell me if--if Mr. Grandon asked you to marry me--before----" Eugene springs up and utters a low, angry ejaculation, strides across the floor and then back again. Violet's face is crimsoned to its utmost capacity, and her eyes have that awful beseechingness that cuts him to the soul. If he could, if he dared deny it! but even as this flashes through his brain a stony kind of certainty settles in every line, and he gathers that denial would be useless. "See here, my dear little sister," and sitting down he takes the small, cold hand in his. "I will tell you the truth. There is nothing horrible or disgraceful in it! Your father proposed that instead of having any business trouble to be years in the course of settlement, I should marry you, as the patent was in such an uncertain state and he had invested everything in it. It simply joined the fortunes, don't you see? Well, I was a dumb, blundering idiot, head over heels in an infatuation, and knew nothing about you, but it will be the regret of my whole life that I did _not_ come when Floyd sent for me. And I suppose he fell in love with you himself; he could not have cared for the fortune, he had enough of his own." Violet draws a long, shivering breath, but her very soul seems icy cold with doubt. "You did not--despise me?" she cries, with passionate entreaty.