“Betty,” he said, “I do not know whether you are aware of it, but there are only two people between Noll, through his mother, and Lord Wyntwarde of Cavil....” The lash cut deep, but he was too engrossed in his object to see the girl’s courage. “Lord Wyntwarde is, frankly, somewhat of a brute--capricious, full of whims. He has, after ignoring the boy from his birth, suddenly expressed a wish that Noll should go to Oxford, a wish also to provide a career for him--such as--I--cannot give him.... He has made, as one of his conditions, a most binding proviso that Noll shall not marry without his consent, nor outside his set----” The girl spake no smallest word, gave no sign. Anthony went on: “I am going to ask you not to spoil Noll’s career----” The words cut into the girl’s very flesh; but she said not a word. Anthony blundered on, brutally unconscious of the simple urgent fact that the girl had not wanted to spoil the lad’s career, that she was in no way on her defence--that he was committing himself to the base insolence, the most ignoble insolence of which we can be guilty, of the lie that presumes the accusation of the innocent. It were as though indifferent cutlery should beg tempered steel to try and be tempered steel. “You are very beautiful,” he said--“you probably do not realize how beautiful. And I am going to appeal to you not to allow Noll to get engaged to you in case he should wish it--for it would be folly in me to pretend that I don’t see that he has a boy’s love for you, which, if other things were different, God knows would be the happiest thing for him.” So he blundered on, excusing the girl from his own insolences; even making all allowances for her out of the deeps of his self-sufficiency. Betty’s fingers remained tight clasped before her--her head bowed down--but she made no slightest movement, standing deathly still. And Anthony, his false step irretrievably made, realized slowly that he had done a brutal and foolish thing; saw perhaps even more clearly that he had won a success; but, rebuffed by the girl’s silence at last, and embarrassed and not without a suspicion of shame, he slowly retired from the room. The door closed upon him. The girl was left utterly alone. A hot flush had burnt into her face. She stretched out her hand and with difficulty reached the mantel. They had now turned even her deep love for this youth, the only being left to her, into a thing to bring her shame. It was the whip of scorpions. She had stood and taken the lashes upon her slender shoulders; but at last the hellish device that invented the punishment of the solitary cell wrung from her lips a pathetic little moan. CHAPTER XXVII _Wherein a Dainty Little Lady, looking out of the Window of a Shabby Home at a Shabbier Destiny, joins the Streaming Crowd whose Faces pass in the Street, drifting towards the Strange Riot of Living_