“She didn’t. It was you”--slowly. “I tell you she saw what I was doing and stood waiting. She never ran till she saw you, and knew she must. She would rather I was dead; she hates me.” “Cristiane, are you out of your senses?” He shook her roughly by the shoulder. “Your ingratitude I cannot help; your abuse of her I will not bear. As for loving her, I love her with all my heart. I’d marry her to-morrow if she would have me.” And this was the Miles she had thought of as miserable with his love that she would have none of! She was all passion in the frank brutality with which she turned on him. “She can’t do that; she daren’t! She’s playing a double game with you. She’s a bad, wicked girl”--her voice rising angrily. “I saw her this very day lying with her head on Mr. Wray’s shoulder. She was pretending to be asleep, and she stretched out her arms and put them about his neck, and----” “Look here, Cristiane,” Miles broke in angrily, frantically. “You can shut up! If it is true I don’t want to hear it, but if it’s a lie, you’ll have to pay for every word of it.” “Miles,” she said slowly, “it’s every word of it true. I saw her. I was on the stairs and she was lying on the sofa in the hall. I saw him come and kneel beside her. She’s a horrid, horrid girl--I’m so miserable”--with sudden choking tears. “I wish I hadn’t told you. But I know you were with her often lately. I couldn’t let you go on without telling you.” “Then allow me to tell you your conscientious scruples do you no credit,” he said stoutly. Yet he did not see in his pain that she had changed her tactics utterly, even while he had been talking to her. It was all too much of a piece with that fatal cry of Mark, that senseless terror of having her engagement to him an open thing. Ismay, his Ismay, untrue! The solid ground had been cut away under his feet, yet he was stubbornly faithful. He would not believe this spoiled child, who was not even grateful to the girl who had nearly died to save her. “You don’t believe me? Oh, Miles, what can I do?” Cristiane moaned. She hid her angry, tearless eyes that he might think she cried. “I wouldn’t believe an angel from heaven against Ismay!” he said stoutly. But he lied, and he knew it. As for the note Cristiane implied Ismay had kept back, he never gave it a thought. Cristiane and her feelings were nothing to him now. But Ismay and that man from London were another story. “Don’t dare to say she did not try to save you,” he said to drown his thoughts. “I was there. I did not see your danger, no more did she.” “And yet--you saved me,” she said quietly, and before he knew it she had kissed his strong hand softly. He drew it away as if her lips had stung. “I saved you as I would have saved a drowning dog,” he said, his voice ominously level. “Now you know. I care nothing for you. My love for you was only play. I know it now.”