He restrained himself with an effort. “What am I to call you then?” he said, looking at her sister. “Has she never married? How wonderful that is! Miss Crosthwaite then: since you wish it, I will call you so.” A momentary shadow of humiliation went over the proud face. She had chosen not to marry. She had always been beautiful, and she was not without fortune; but nobody whom she thought good enough had ever asked Anna Crosthwaite to marry him. And she did not like to remember this in presence of her old lover, whom she had loved once in her silly youth, though she forsook him: it was not, however, because of that love, or anything connected with it, that she received him thus now. “I am Miss Crosthwaite,” she said, “though you affect to be surprised. It is not all a woman thinks of to marry any fool that turns up, and to become the mother of fools. Go away to your son, Mary. That was your ambition: as it is your folly now, to believe in every deception, and allow yourself to be led by the nose. I think your _protégé_ had better withdraw too, now that I have seen him. He has not a feature of poor Leonard Crosthwaite,” she added, eyeing him steadfastly. “No one, I suppose, can doubt my capacity to judge. His complexion is different, his features are different. Go away, sir, and be thankful we don’t turn you over at once to the police.” “Is this,” he said, half-stifled with astonishment and indignation, “is this all you have to say to me--” “It is all I have to say to you,” she said; “and this is my room, where I am supposed to have some right to choose my visitors. Go! You can do anything you please; I, for one, am not afraid of you. You may go.” He burst out laughing at the extraordinary perversity of the scene. If he had not laughed he must have been furious--it was his only deliverance; and yet it may be supposed there was not much laughing in his heart. “This is the most extraordinary reception to meet with,” he said, “after coming so far, after staying away so long. If it is a jest, it is a bad jest, Anna. Suppose that it is hard upon us after all this long interval, to look upon each other with such changed eyes--still there is such a thing as justice. You know me as well as I know you. It is by instinct--it is because we cannot help it. For, heaven knows, you are as unlike the Anna I left as night is to day.” She did not reply. A hasty gleam of passion came out of her keen eyes. Then she put out her hand to the bell. “Simmons,” she said, “will see this person to the door, Mary. I don’t want to be hard upon any acquaintance of yours; you know a very strange set of people, I must say; but I will not be insulted. Simmons must see this person out of the house.”