"Ah; but you do not understand. She begged that I would not desert her in her loneliness. We have been so much together that I could not desert her." "I certainly do not understand that, Paul. You have allowed yourself to be entrapped into a promise of marriage; and then, for reasons which we will not go into now but which we both thought to be adequate, you resolved to break your promise, thinking that you would be justified in doing so. But nothing can justify you in living with the lady afterwards on such terms as to induce her to suppose that your old promise holds good." "She does not think so. She cannot think so." "Then what must she be, to be here with you? And what must you be, to be here, in public, with such a one as she is? I don't know why I should trouble you or myself about it. People live now in a way that I don't comprehend. If this be your way of living, I have no right to complain." "For God's sake, Carbury, do not speak in that way. It sounds as though you meant to throw me over." "I should have said that you had thrown me over. You come down here to this hotel, where we are both known, with this lady whom you are not going to marry;--and I meet you, just by chance. Had I known it, of course I could have turned the other way. But coming on you by accident, as I did, how am I not to speak to you? And if I speak, what am I to say? Of course I think that the lady will succeed in marrying you." "Never." "And that such a marriage will be your destruction. Doubtless she is good-looking." "Yes, and clever. And you must remember that the manners of her country are not as the manners of this country." "Then if I marry at all," said Roger, with all his prejudice expressed strongly in his voice, "I trust I may not marry a lady of her country. She does not think that she is to marry you, and yet she comes down here and stays with you. Paul, I don't believe it. I believe you, but I don't believe her. She is here with you in order that she may marry you. She is cunning and strong. You are foolish and weak. Believing as I do that marriage with her would be destruction, I should tell her my mind,--and leave her." Paul at the moment thought of the gentleman in Oregon, and of certain difficulties in leaving. "That's what I should do. You must go in now, I suppose, and eat your dinner." "I may come to the hall as I go back home?"