"Nothing whatever! You may possibly consider my attitude selfish," the Marquis added, "but I find myself wholly indifferent to your interests in this matter." "I should be able to reconcile myself even to that," was the grim reply, "if I have been able to penetrate for a single moment that accursed selfishness of yours--if I have been able to make you think, for however short a time, of Marcia's future instead of your own." The Marquis rose without haste from his place, and rang the bell. "You will permit me, Mr. Borden," he invited, "to offer you some refreshments?" "Thank you, I desire nothing." The Marquis pointed to the door, by which Gossett was standing. "That, then, I think, concludes our interview," he said, with icy courtesy. Mr. Borden walked the full length of the very long apartment, suffered himself to be respectfully conducted across the great hall, out on to the flags and into the motor-car which he had hired in Fakenham. It was not until he was on his way through the park that he opened his lips and found them attuned to blasphemy. At the top of the gentle slope, however, where the car was brought to a standstill while the driver opened the iron gate, he turned back and looked at Mandeleys, looked at its time-worn turrets, its mullioned windows, the Norman chapel, the ruined cloisters, the ivy-covered west wing, the beautiful Elizabethan chimneys. A strange, heterogeneous mass of architecture, yet magnificent, in its way impressive, almost inspiring. He looked at the little cottage almost at its gates, from which a thin, spiral column of smoke was ascending. Perhaps in those few seconds, and with the memory of that interview still rankling, he felt a glimmering of real understanding. Something which had always been incomprehensible to him in Marcia's story stood more or less revealed. CHAPTER XXVIII The Marquis, if he had been a keen physiognomist, might perhaps have read all that he had come to London to know in Marcia's expression as he made his unexpected entrance into her sitting room on the following day. She was seated at her desk, with a great pile of red roses on one side of her, and a secretary, to whom she was dictating, on the other. She swung round in her chair and for a moment was speechless. She looked at her visitor incredulously, a little helplessly, with some traces of an emotion which puzzled him. Her greeting, however, was hearty enough. She sprang to her feet and held out both her hands. "My dear man, how unlike you! Really, I think that I like surprises. Give me both your hands--so! Let me look at you." "I should have warned you of my coming," he said, raising the ink-stained fingers which he was clasping to his lips, "but to tell you the truth it was a caprice." "I thought you were in the country, at Mandeleys!" she exclaimed. "I was," he replied. "I have motored up from there this morning. I came to see you."