“Please understand, Blaise, that I want neither your advice nor your criticism. If I choose to make a friend of Geoffrey Burke--or of any other man--I shall do so without asking your permission or approval. What I do, or don’t do, is no business of yours.” For a moment they faced each other, his eyes, stormy as her own, dark with anger. His hands clenched themselves. “If I could,” he said hoarsely, “I would _make_ it my business.” He wheeled round and left the room without another word. Jean stood staring dazedly at the blank panels of the door which had closed behind him. She wanted to laugh... or to cry. To laugh, because with every sullen word he revealed the thing he was so sedulously intent on keeping from her. To cry, because he had taken her pretended indifference at its face value, and so another film of misunderstanding had risen to thicken the veil between them--the veil which he would not, and she, being a woman, could not, draw aside. CHAPTER XIX--THE SPIDER PROBABLY masculine obtuseness and the feminine faculty for dissimulation are together responsible for more than half the broken hearts with which the highways of life are littered. The Recalcitrant Parent, the Other Woman--be she never so guileful--or the Other Man, as the case may be, are none of them as potent a menace to the ultimate happy issue of events as the mountain of small misunderstandings which a man and a maid in love are capable of piling up for themselves. The man is prone to see only that which the woman intends he shall--and no self-respecting feminine thing is going to unveil the mysteries of her heart until she is very definitely assured that that is precisely what the man in the case is aching for her to do. So she dissimulates with all the skill which Nature and a few odd thousand years or so of tradition have taught her and pretends that the Only Man in the World means rather less to her than her second-best shoe buckles. With the result that he probably goes silently and sadly away, convinced that he hasn’t an outside chance, while all the time she is simply quivering to pour out at his feet the whole treasure of her love. In this respect Blaise and Jean blundered as egregiously as any other love-befogged pair. Following upon their quarrel over the matter of Jean’s attitude towards Geoffrey Burke, Tormarin retreated once again into those fastnesses of aloof reserve which seemed to deny the whole memory of that “magic moment” at Montavan. And Jean, just because she was unhappy, flirted outrageously with the origin of the quarrel, finding a certain reckless enjoyment in the flavour of excitement lent to the proceedings by the fact that Burke was in deadly earnest. Playing with an “unexploded bomb” at least sufficed to take her thoughts off other matters, and enabled her momentarily to forget everything for which forgetting seemed the only possible and sensible prescription.