Three days after that they were married. She started a new, intoxicating career as mistress of the gorgeously appointed flat at Marquise Mansions. CHAPTER XV. IT was past eleven and they were languidly pecking at breakfast. The brick-red sun forced himself into the room, made the gorgeously upholstered settee and chairs look faded, showed the green tarnish on the great copper pots, the gray rim of dust on the delft which crowded the shelves, and the darker layer which the housemaid had left in the interstices of the elaborately carved furniture. Pamela’s morning gown, of some clinging primrose stuff, had caught London smuts in the loose ruffles of its sleeves. She lifted her cup and the ruffles fell back, showing finger-and-thumb bruises on the white flesh. She was sallow, blotchy, her eyes muddy and swollen. Edred kept looking up from his paper and staring savagely; the weary face, all quiver and traces of heavy tears, infuriated him. “I don’t know what is coming over you,” he broke out at last. “You have only two moods--the nagging or the maudlin.” “Edred! I--I thought you’d say you were sorry for last night. Look!” She held up her bare arm accusingly. “Sorry!” His frank look of amazement was absolutely genuine. “What have I to be sorry about?” “Look!” The white arm, with the ugly purple marks, quivered before his eyes. “Pooh! you bruise with a touch. It’s nothing.” “The things you said----” “Said! You’d madden any man with your stiff airs of prudery.” “I’ve begged you not to ask Milligan here.” “I shall ask him as often as I like. He’s useful. You’ll please be civil to everybody who’s useful--to Sutton in particular. You treat the fellow as if he were----” “The cur he is,” she concluded scornfully. “You’re no good if you can’t help me to play my game. That is why you are here, confound you,” he cried savagely. “You don’t think”--his sneer was devilish--“that I married you because I had such a supreme longing for fireside virtue.” “They are all alike--your men,” she cried out passionately. “They regard me as--as--I cannot finish.” She buried her disfigured face in her hands. Every line of her shaking body was crouching, subjective; she was a human hound with a brute for a master, a brute on whom she fawned. “It’s new for you to be so particular.” “I--I don’t understand.” She lifted her face suddenly; let him see it all grotesquely distorted, drawn out of shape. “I repeat; it is new for you to be so particular. If you can throw yourself into the arms of one man----” “One man?” “These mawkish airs of innocence don’t impress me. We’ve been quite bare to each other for twelve months. You came here; forced yourself on me. Why couldn’t you stay behind like a sensible, modest woman, and marry Jethro? I was getting on perfectly well, wasn’t I? Did I look as if I wanted you?” “Edred!”