The speech stung her. She glared at him across the narrow table, and, in the moment, each had a sense of unreality. The quarrel was like a bolt from the blue, as startling and unexpected--as most quarrels are--the bitterest and most lasting. Then she sprang to her feet and hurled a taunt at him some Imp of Darkness must have suggested: "You're jealous!" She stamped a foot at him. "That's the real reason. You're jealous of everybody that would be friends with me! You're jealous of Hughie. You didn't like his coming here and you don't like his writing to me! I _hate_ you--I won't stay any longer!" It was the blood of Jezebel of the Sand Coulee talking, and there was the look of her mother on the girl's face, in her reckless, uncontrolled fury. Mormon Joe winced, exactly as though she had struck him. He sat quite still while the color faded, leaving his face bloodless. Kate never had known anything like the white rage it depicted. Persons at the Sand Coulee who lost their temper cursed volubly and loudly, and threatened or made bodily attacks upon the cause of it. In spite of herself she shrank a little as he, too, got up slowly and faced her. She didn't know him at all--this man who first threw his cigarette away carefully, as though he were in a drawing room and must regard the ashes--he was a personality from an environment with which she was unfamiliar. Then, as though she were his equal in years, experience and intelligence, he spoke to her in a tone that was cool and impersonal, yet which went slash! slash! slash! like the fine, deep, quick cut of a razor. "I had no notion that you entertained any such feeling towards me. It is something in the nature of a--er--revelation. You are quite right about leaving. Upon second thought, you are quite right about everything--right to keep your promise to Mrs. Toomey, since you gave it, right in your assertion that I am jealous. I am--but not in the sense in which you mean it. "I have been jealous of your dignity--of the respect that is due you. I have resented keenly any attempt to belittle you. That is why Disston was not welcome when he came to see you. It is the reason why I have not shown a pleasure I did not feel in his writing you!" "What do you mean?" she demanded. "I mean that he took you to that dance on a wager--a bet--to prove that he had the courage. To make a spectacle of you--for a story with which to regale his friends and laugh over." She groped for the edge of the table. "Who told you?" "Toomey." "I don't believe it!" "Teeters verified it." She sat down on the box from which she had risen. Unmoved by the blow he had dealt her, he continued: "You went to that dance against my wishes. What I expected to happen did happen, though you did not choose to tell me.