"And even those dearer and nearer than friends!" Pat flung at her. "Oh, I realize that I'm the classic target. A poor Irish peer--the poorest of the lot!--who dares to marry America's richest girl. No beastly trick too vile to believe of him! Of course a blighter like that couldn't have married the girl for love." To hear the words spoken, even in bitterest sarcasm, was like the prick of a knife. Juliet had pushed them out of her own mind so often that it was sharpest anguish to have them thrust into it by Pat's adored lips. If he loved her, she could not see how it was possible for him to speak like that! In thinking this, she pitied herself desperately, and forgot her own words which had lashed him to retaliation. She forgot, too, how that very morning her lips had flung this very taunt. She had shown him sharply how much her own she considered her fortune, her house, and everything he shared as her husband. It seemed to her that now he was inadvertently confessing, rather than sneering at possible accusers. Juliet defended her own attractions pitifully, yet there was nothing pitiful in her look. She loomed tall and aggressive, and cruelly beautiful, with blazing eyes and cheeks. "A great many men have told me they loved me, and that no one could _help_ loving me for myself, but I never believed any of them till I met you; and then I was a conceited fool to think you could care for me after Lyda Pavoya." Pat started as if she had boxed his ears: and Juliet, too, was surprised. She had not meant to say that. The thing had said itself. For an instant his eyes flamed. Then their fire died out, and left them cold. He looked disgusted. "I told you once that I had never loved Mademoiselle Pavoya," he said. "One isn't used to having one's word doubted. It's rather humiliating to have it happen with one's own wife. But putting that aside, why not keep to the point? Why bring up the lady's name when we are discussing quite a different affair--the affair of these pearls?" Out of Claremanagh's coldness a demon was born, and flew straight to Juliet's heart. For an instant she lost all sense of her own love for her husband. She hated him and wished to hurt him as much as she could, because it seemed that he had gone out of his way to hurt her. She tingled all over with indignant humiliation. It was as if Pat had said, "I happen to be your husband, but you are only a commoner with no traditions of fine breeding behind you, while I am a man whose ancestors might have had yours for servants. No wonder you have no intuitive idea of decent decorum." "_Is_ it a different affair?" she cried. "Or is it one single affair--the affair of Lyda Pavoya and your pearls?" Again the words had spoken themselves, but a flare of enlightenment came with them. Surely something had _made_ her speak. Something which _knew_ what she hadn't thought of till this moment: that Lyda Pavoya had taken the pearls.