Bryce, who was slowly pouring some liquid from one bottle into another, looked quietly across the room and did not interrupt himself in his work. Ransford knew that he must have recognized a certain significance in the words just addressed to him--but he showed no outward sign of it, and the liquid went on trickling from one bottle to the other with the same uniform steadiness. “Yes?” said Bryce inquiringly. “One moment.” He finished his task calmly, put the corks in the bottles, labelled one, restored the other to a shelf, and turned round. Not a man to be easily startled--not easily turned from a purpose, this, thought Ransford as he glanced at Bryce's eyes, which had a trick of fastening their gaze on people with an odd, disconcerting persistency. “I'm sorry to say what I must say,” he began. “But--you've brought it on yourself. I gave you a hint some time ago that your attentions were not welcome to Miss Bewery.” Bryce made no immediate response. Instead, leaning almost carelessly and indifferently against the table at which he had been busy with drugs and bottles, he took a small file from his waistcoat pocket and began to polish his carefully cut nails. “Yes?” he said, after a pause. “Well?” “In spite of it,” continued Ransford, “you've since addressed her again on the matter--not merely once, but twice.” Bryce put his file away, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, crossed his feet as he leaned back against the table--his whole attitude suggesting, whether meaningly or not, that he was very much at his ease. “There's a great deal to be said on a point like this,” he observed. “If a man wishes a certain young woman to become his wife, what right has any other man--or the young woman herself, for that matter to say that he mustn't express his desires to her?” “None,” said Ransford, “provided he only does it once--and takes the answer he gets as final.” “I disagree with you entirely,” retorted Bryce. “On the last particular, at any rate. A man who considers any word of a woman's as being final is a fool. What a woman thinks on Monday she's almost dead certain not to think on Tuesday. The whole history of human relationship is on my side there. It's no opinion--it's a fact.” Ransford stared at this frank remark, and Bryce went on, coolly and imperturbably, as if he had been discussing a medical problem. “A man who takes a woman's first answer as final,” he continued, “is, I repeat, a fool. There are lots of reasons why a woman shouldn't know her own mind at the first time of asking. She may be too surprised. She mayn't be quite decided. She may say one thing when she really means another. That often happens. She isn't much better equipped at the second time of asking. And there are women--young ones--who aren't really certain of themselves at the third time. All that's common sense.”