‘I have been doing my duty,’ returns Mrs. Prior, who has pulled herself together. Her tone is stern and uncompromising. ‘You have been at the Cottage?’ ‘You have guessed quite correctly.’ ‘You have seen that poor girl, then, and——’ ‘I have seen that most wretched girl, and told her my opinion of her.’ Wyndham makes a sharp ejaculation. ‘You spoke to her, insulted her, that poor child?’ He feels that reproach is no longer possible to him. What has she said? What, indeed, has she left unsaid? Great heavens, what monsters some women can be! ‘I explained to her her position. Not that she needed explanation, in spite of all her extremely clever efforts at an innocent bearing. I passed over that, however, and told her—hoping that perhaps she had some real feeling for you, though I understand that class of person never has any honest feeling—that beyond all doubt Lord Shangarry would disinherit you if he heard of your connection with her.’ She pauses here. This is her trump card, and she looks straight at Paul as she plays it. It proves valueless. He passes it over as though it were of no consequence whatever. ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ says he, struggling with his passionate rage, and grief, and shame. ‘I hardly know how to condemn you strongly enough. I wish to God you were not a woman, and then I should know what to do. This girl you have so insulted is a girl as good and pure as the best girl you have ever met, and yet you have gone down there’—pointing in the direction of the Cottage—‘and deliberately hurt and wounded her. I wonder you had the courage to do it. Are you’—growing now furious—‘a fool that you couldn’t see how sweet and gentle and innocent she is?’ ‘Is it your intercourse with this sweet and gentle and innocent girl that has made you so extremely rude?’ asks his aunt in her low, well-bred voice. ‘If so, I consider I have done an extra duty by my visit to her. It may have results. Your disinheritance by Shangarry, for example, is sure to have an effect upon her. I am afraid, after all, it is you who are the fool. In the meantime, Paul, I can quite see that your infatuation for an extremely ordinary sort of girl has blinded you to her defects. Some of these people, I am told, quite study our manners nowadays; but she lacks distinction of any sort. That you happen to be in love with her at present of course prevents your seeing these faults.’ ‘You seem so remarkably well up in the affair,’ says Wyndham, who could now have cheerfully strangled her, ‘that I suppose it will be quite superfluous to tell you that love has no voice in the matter. I am not in love with her, and she most positively is not in love with me.’ Mrs. Prior makes a contemptuous movement of her thin shoulders.