She did come, after what seemed like another full age of suspense; and when I saw her dear face above the intervening hothouse roses, I thought it was fairer than any flower that ever bloomed, and so I should have told her if she had not frozen me so that I could only stand before her and try to stammer some word of thanks for her coming. “Well?” she said, chilling me with a look of quiet scorn. I tried to face her as I had faced my enemies in the field, but it was no manner of use; she had me beaten at my own game, and that before the game was begun. “How can I say what I’d like to say when you look at me that way?” I protested. “Is it fair to condemn me unheard?” “I have come to let you say that word you spoke of,” she announced, and her tone was most discouraging. “You put me a thousand miles off!” I raged. “I can’t shout across the world at you!” “There is no need to shout or to lose your temper, Mr. Page. You can tell me in ten words, perhaps, why you have thought it proper to change your coat and your flag, when--” she broke down at this and put her face in her hands, and I could hear her saying over and over again softly, “Oh, the disgrace of it!--the miserable, wretched disgrace of it!” “It is no disgrace, Beatrix,” I burst out hotly. “If I could tell you--if I dared tell you--” There was no scorn in her eyes when she uncovered them for me. But there were tears. “Yes; if you could tell me, Dick,” she repeated after me, eagerly. If I had looked at her another second she would have had it all out of me, in spite of my pledge to Mr. Hamilton, or my life or John Champe’s or any other thing that might be jeopardized. So I had to star-gaze at the flaring lamp beyond the glass roof when I said: “There may be reasons--good reasons, Beatrix. Can’t you trust me to tell you them when we have a better time and--and place than this?” “There can be no reason at all that will stand in the breach for you, Dick. You know it, and that is why you try to put me off. But there must have been a cause, a most bitter cause, to bring you here in that coat, and as the friend of that unspeakable man whose mere presence makes me lock myself in my room when he comes to see poor Margaret.” She was pleading now; I knew it, and must still be obdurate and hard. “There was a cause, as you say,” I retorted. “There must have been, since I have fought and spilt blood on the other side. But I can tell you nothing to-night without forswearing myself more than I had to, to wear this coat you dislike so heartily. But I had a cause,” I repeated, going back to the beginning like a clock wound up to strike all its hours over again.