The truth was that he seemed to fill the room. The time had passed when he was ill at ease in the house. Now he was cool to defiance. Ffrench had never found him so embarrassing as he was upon this particular evening. He spoke very little, sitting in his chair silent, with a gloomy and brooding look. When he directed his attention upon any one, it was upon Rachel. The prolonged gaze which he occasionally fixed upon her was one of evil scrutiny, which stirred her usually cool blood not a little. She never failed, however, to meet it with composure. At last she did a daring thing. Under cover of a conversation between her father and Saint Meran, she went to the table at his side and began to turn over the books upon it. "I think," she said, in an undertone, "that you have something to say to me." "Aye," he answered, "I have that, and the time'll come when I shall say it, too." "You think I'm afraid to hear it," she continued. "Follow me into the next room and see." Then she addressed her father, speaking aloud. "Your plans for the new bank are in the next room, I believe," she said. "I wish to show them to Mr. Haworth." "Y--yes," he admitted, somewhat reluctantly. "They are on my table." She passed through the folding doors and Haworth followed her. She stopped at one of the windows and waited for him to speak, and it was during this moment in which she waited that he saw in her face what he had not seen before--a faint pallor and a change which was not so much a real change as the foreshadowing of one to come. He saw it now because it chanced that the light struck full upon her. "Now," she said, "say your say. But let me tell you that I shall listen not because I feel a shadow of interest in it, but because I _know_ you thought I shrank from hearing it." He pushed open the French window and strode on to the terrace. "Step out here," he said. She went out. "This," he said, glancing about him, "this is th' place you stood on th' night you showed yourself to the strikers." She made no answer. "It's as good a place as any," he went on. "I'm going to have it out with you," he said, with bitter significance. Then, for the first time, it struck her that she had overstepped the mark and done a dangerous thing, but she would have borne a great deal sooner than turn back, and so she remained. "I've stood it a long time," he said, "and now I'm going to reckon up. There's a good bit of reckoning up to be done betwixt you and me, for all you've held me at arm's length." "I am glad," she put in, "that you acknowledge that I did hold you at arm's length, and that you were not blind to it." "Oh," he answered, "I wasn't blind to it, no more than you were blind to the other; and from first to last it's been my comfort to remember that you weren't blind to the other--that you knew it as well as I did. I've held to that." He came close to her.