The calmness and decision of the manner arrested her. She sank back into a chair, regarding him with defiant eyes. "So you have followed me," continued Herman, speaking with painful slowness, so that every word seemed to poor Ninitta to fall upon her like a curse; "so you have played the spy upon me. Ah!" As he looked at her she began to cower. She shrank back in her seat, putting up her hands to shield her face from his gaze. "Yet I meant to marry you," he said, half to himself, although still addressing her. "I came to-night to say, 'Come, Ninitta, let us take up the broken romance that a cruel mistake interrupted there in Rome.' I had long ago outgrown my old fancy, but I meant to be true to my promise to you. I meant to give up even my ambition for your sake; to make your life happy and secure. And this is your trust in me! If you really loved me, to track me like a thief would have been impossible to you. And where have you learned this trick of playing the spy?" he went on with growing wrath, becoming more and more cruel with every word. "It is a relic of your Paris life, I fancy. It is hardly a resource to which a good girl would be driven. I at least believed you when you told me you had been true to me." He spoke rapidly, aggressively. The fact that he was outraging his own instincts in beating with bitter words the girl who bowed before him with drooping head and disheveled hair made him but the more harsh. To fall from the height of self-sacrifice into a pool of vulgar intrigue! Bah! His disgust at himself for ever having known this woman seemed too great to be borne. Yet under all his passionate protest and repulsion he was conscious that he doubted what he was himself saying with so much vehemence; that he secretly believed Ninitta to be true and pure, and that to her Italian blood, to her peasant nurture, was due the espionage in which she had been self-betrayed. The sting of conscience, too, in the knowledge that the model's jealousy of Helen was well founded, the humiliation of finding his feelings and motives discovered, increased his irritation. He felt a base desire to stab and humiliate Ninitta, but for whom he might be free to win the one woman he had ever loved; and the more his denunciations recoiled to hurt himself, the more eagerly he poured them out, as in some moods of mental anguish one finds relief in the pain of self-inflicted physical hurts. "Yes," he said, more and more completely abandoning control of himself; "yes, this tells sufficiently what you have learned in Paris." "Oh, no, no, no!" she cried, flinging herself at his feet and groveling there. "No, no! For the love of the Virgin, signor, not that! I have been good. Oh, for the love of God, signor! For the love of God!"