After breakfast Floyd summons his mother and Eugene into the library. Lucia Brade calls in her pony phaeton and entices Pauline, who is always ready for a pleasure. Violet flutters about her room, sends Cecil and Jane out for a constitutional, and then picks up a book. Summer is on the wane, and the air has a fragrance of ripening grapes, sun-warmed fruit, and the luxurious sweetness of madeira-blooms. The voices from the library touch her faintly. Mrs. Grandon's has a high, aggressive swell now and then, and Eugene's drops to that sort of sullen key she knows so well in the past. What is taking place? Will there be some new trouble for Floyd? She walks down to the summer-house from some half-defined, delicate motive. After a while the three gentlemen go away, Floyd giving a questioning glance around. She drops her book on her knee and lapses into a wondering mood, when a step breaks her revery. Eugene is flushed and angry, yet it does not make him the less handsome, though it is very different from his usual indolent ease. "What is the matter?" she asks, for form's sake, for she almost knows. "Matter!" and he kicks viciously at a pebble that has dared to rear its head in the smooth walk, sending it over on the grassy lawn. "The matter is that Floyd is selling us all out with a high hand. That is what Murray's visit and all this going to and fro mean. He has had an offer, and he doesn't care for anything so long as _you_ come out on the topmost round." "I?" Violet flushes and her eyes grow moist. "Well, it isn't your fault, after all, and one need not grudge you anything," he says, strangely moved. "Yes, these men want to buy out the whole thing, and you'll have a private fortune of your own that will be stunning! Floyd isn't green at bargain-making. Now they have gone over to tackle Wilmarth, and a sweet time they will have of it. I should like to see the fun. But what am I to do afterward?" and he studies the greensward gloomily. "You?" she repeats, and the matter settles itself beautifully to her vision. "Why, you will marry Miss Pauline Murray." "Marry!" Eugene strides up and down with a grim sense of the irony of fate. Once he was asked to marry Miss St. Vincent to save his fortune, now it is Miss Murray. He is a part of the business, to be bandied about and knocked down to the highest bidder. "You do love her?" Violet says this with the rarest, tenderest entreaty. "Love her? No, I do not." He comes nearer to Violet with his eyes aflame, his face pale, and his lips savagely compressed. "Have _you_ been so blind? Did that show deceive you? Why, you must guess, you must know it is you and not she whom I love." Violet sits astounded. She is too much amazed even to resent this. Surely he cannot have been so deceitful, so false-hearted. "You like me," she begins, tremulously, "and I am your sister, your brother's wife----" "And you might have been mine! It maddens me when I think of it." "And it humiliates me."