“No, I am not going,” he answered, with sudden temper. “I am not the sort of man to be ordered about. I am not going to stir a foot until we literally kiss and make friends. You know perfectly well I have fallen in love with you. I wanted to have you all by yourself to-day to tell you so. So I tell you. I love you, and I insist on being heard.” “_You_ love me?” she said with great contempt. “You look like it!” She jerked herself backwards so as to find support against the pillows as she sat. “What do you propose to do?” she asked him, with an ugly look on her face. As a matter of fact, he had made no plans whatever, the role of theatrical libertine never having come within his experience. But her question gave an opening for the brute that necessarily lingers in most men. “I’ll stay here all night, until you kiss me of your own free will.” “I have always thought of you as a coward,” she said. “I suppose that’s a threat to compromise me. It won’t do me much harm, I assure you.” He threw his hat and gloves on the table and came close to the bedside. The brute led him on. Her beauty had captivated him. Her scorn angered him. His shifty blue eyes gleamed. “If you don’t do what I ask--it’s a very small thing--I’ll take it by force and I’ll stay here all night, and I’ll follow you wherever you go and see you every day, until you come to your senses. I love you and I’m not going to be trifled with. And I’m damned if you can say you have given me no encouragement.” He bent forward. She thought he was going to throw his arms round her. All the pent-up hatred of him, all the fermenting elements of self-loathing, remorse, and despair, all the agonising recrudescence of hopeless, passionate love for the man that was and was not her husband, found vent in a hoarse inarticulate cry. And then she lost control of reason, and burst into passionate invective. “You love me! You! You think a woman who knows what you are would have anything to do with you, save fool you and throw you aside. You who threw away a wife that was worth ten million of me, and a friend that was worth twenty million of you. I hate you. I despise you. I despise you as much as I despise myself, and that’s saying a good deal.” She spat the words at him: “When you were living smugly with your wife, you looked down upon me. Now you have got rid of her, you come to me like a brute and a coward.” “You’ll kindly leave Mrs. Merriam out of the discussion,” said Gerard sardonically.