“The Two Hundred and Seventy--all I could get from you, as you reminded me yesterday, so that I had to give up the rest It was my idea,” she went on--“it was my idea.” “To bleed me quite to death?” Oh, his ice was broken now! “To make you raise money--since you could, you _could_. You did, you did--so what better proof?” His hands fell from what he had touched; he could only stare--her own manner for it was different now too. “I did. I did indeed--!” And the woful weak simplicity of it, which seemed somehow all that was left him, fell even on his own ear. “Well then, here it is--it isn’t lost!” she returned with a graver face. “‘Here’ it is,” he gasped, “my poor agonised old money--my blood?” “Oh, it’s _my_ blood too, you must know now!” She held up her head as not before--as for her right to speak of the thing to-day most precious to her. “I took it, but this--my being here this way--is what I’ve made of it! That was the idea I had!” Her “ideas,” as things to boast of, staggered him. “To have everything in the world, like this, at my wretched expense?” She had folded her arms back again--grasping each elbow she sat firm; she knew he could see, and had known well from the first, what she had wanted to say, difficult, monstrous though it might be. “No more than at my own--but to do something with your money that you’d never do yourself.” “Myself, myself?” he wonderingly wailed. “Do you know--or don’t you?--what my life has been?” She waited, and for an instant, though the light in the room had failed a little more and would soon be mainly that of the flaring lamps on the windy Parade, he caught from her dark eye a silver gleam of impatience. “You’ve suffered and you’ve worked--which, God knows, is what I’ve done! _Of course_ you’ve suffered,” she said--“you inevitably had to! We have to,” she went on, “to do or to be or to get anything.” “And pray what have I done or been or got?” Herbert Dodd found it almost desolately natural to demand. It made her cover him again as with all she was thinking of. “Can you imagine nothing, or can’t you conceive--?” And then as her challenge struck deeper in, deeper down than it had yet reached, and with the effect of a rush of the blood to his face, “It was _for_ you, it was _for_ you!” she again broke out--“and for what or whom else could it have been?” He saw things to a tune now that made him answer straight: “I thought at one time it might be for Bill Frankle.” “Yes--that was the way you treated me,” Miss Cookham as plainly replied. But he let this pass; his thought had already got away from it. “What good then--its having been for me--has that ever done me?” “Doesn’t it do you any good _now?_” his friend returned. To which she added, with another dim play of her tormented brightness, before he could speak: “But if you won’t even have your tea----!”