"Even those spent with Mrs. Bohun?" To save her life she could not call her "Olga" now. "With _her_?" staring in some surprise at his inquisitor. "Well, it certainly wasn't quite so bad--the waiting, I mean--then. Though still, with my mind full of you, I was----" "You were indeed!" interrupting him hastily, with a contemptuous smile. "Certainly I was," the surprise growing deeper. "I wonder you are not ashamed to sit there and confess it," says Miss Beresford, suddenly, with a wrathful flash in her eyes. "I shall know how to believe you again. To say one thing to me one day, and another thing to another person another day, and----" Here she finds a difficulty in winding up this extraordinary speech, so she says, hurriedly, "It is _horrible_!" "What is horrible?" bewildered. But she pays no heed to his question, thinking it doubtless beneath her. "At least," she says, with fine scorn, "you needn't be untruthful." "Do you know," says Mr. Desmond, desperately, "you are making the most wonderful remarks I ever heard in my life? There is no beginning to them, and I'm dreadfully afraid there will be no ending." "No doubt," scornfully, "you are afraid." "If I allow I am," says Desmond, humbly, "will it induce you to explain?" "You want no explanation," indignantly. "You know very well what you confessed a while ago,--that--that--'_you were_'! _There!_" "_Where?_" "Flirting with Olga Bohun!" "What?" "You did. You know you did. Oh, what perfidy! Only a moment since you declared it openly, shamelessly; and now you deny it! Why I wouldn't have believed it, even of _you_. How _can_ you pretend to forget it?" But that there are tears born of real emotion in her great eyes, Mr. Desmond would assuredly believe she is making a vast joke at his expense, so innocent is he of any offence. "If by some unfortunate method," he says, calmly, "you have metamorphosed any speech of mine into a declaration relative to a flirtation with Mrs. Bohun, you have done an uncommonly clever thing. You have turned a lie into truth. I never said even one spoony word to Olga Bohun in all my life." "Then why," in a still much-aggrieved tone, but with strong symptoms of relenting, "did you say you were?" "I don't remember saying it at all," says poor Mr. Desmond, who has forgotten all about his interrupted remark. "Then what were you saying to Olga just as I came in?" "Oh! _that!_"--brightening into a remembrance of the past by the greatest good luck, or the quarrel might have proved a final one (which would have been a sad pity, as so many right good ones followed it). "You stopped me just now when I was going to tell you about it. When you came this evening I was dancing with Olga, and talking to her of _you_. It was some small consolation." "But you were smiling at her," says Monica, faltering, "and whispering to her--_whispering!_" "Of you. You believe me? Monica, look at me. Do you know I really think that----"