"Ah! forgive me, Dudley!" she cried quickly. "I was blind then, dazzled by the compliments heaped upon me, bewildered by the wealth that had so suddenly become mine after poor Dick's death. I was rendered callous to everything by my foolish desire to shine as the smartest and most popular woman in London. I did not think of you." "Exactly," he said. "Your admission only clinches my argument that, although we have been close friends, no real affection has of later years existed between us. Frankly, had you loved me, you could not have acted with such reckless indiscretion as to risk my name, my position, and my honour." He spoke a truth which admitted of no question. "Now," he went on at last, slowly unclasping her clinging arms from his neck. "It is already late and I have an important appointment at the Foreign Office, for which I am overdue. We must part." "Never!" she cried wildly. "You shall not leave me like this! If you do, I shall call at your chambers every day, and compel you to see me." "Then I must give orders to Parsons not to admit you," he answered quite calmly. "That man of yours is an old bear. Why don't you get rid of him, and have some one less fossilised?" she exclaimed in a gust of fury. "When I called the other day with Lady Meldrum, he was positively rude." "Lady Meldrum!" exclaimed Chisholm, pricking up his ears. "Who's she?" "Oh, a woman who has rather come to the front of late--wife of old Sir Henry Meldrum, the great Glasgow iron-master. We were driving past, and I wanted to see you, so she came in with me, rather than wait in the cold. Quite a smart woman--you ought to know her." "Thanks," responded the Under-Secretary coldly. "I have no desire to have that pleasure. Smart women don't interest me in the least." "That is meant, I suppose, as a compliment," she observed. "You are certainly in a very delightful mood to-day, Dudley." "I have at least spoken the truth," he said, piqued by the knowledge that for some mysterious reason this woman was conniving with a new star in the social firmament, Lady Meldrum, wife of his pet abomination, a Jubilee knight, to effect his marriage with the unknown Muriel--her daughter, of course. "You have unearthed and placed before me all the most ugly phases of my career," cried the unhappy woman with a quick, defiant glance; "and now, after your flood of reproaches, you declare that in future we are to be as strangers." "For the sake of our reputations." "Our reputations? Rubbish!" she laughed cynically. "What reputation has either of us to lose?" He bit his lip. A hasty retort arose within him, but he succeeded in stifling it. "We need not, I think, discuss that point," he said very coldly. She stood in silence waiting for him to proceed. "Well," she asked at last, with an air of mingled defiance and sarcasm. "And what more?" "Nothing. I have finished. I have only to wish you adieu."