“Maud, you’ve gone crazy. All I know is that I’ll not let you spoil your future. I’ll write to Count de Lamolle to-morrow, and I’ll write to Jack Latimer, too.” “What good will that do anybody? Count de Lamolle can’t marry me if I don’t want to. And why should Jack Latimer throw me over because you ask him to? He,” she made a tremulous hesitation that would have touched a softer heart, and then added, “he likes me.” “Likes you!” repeated her mother, with furious scorn, “he likes the five million dollars.” “It’s me,” said Maud, passionately; “it isn’t the money. And he’s the only person in the world except Win who has ever really liked me. I don’t feel when I’m with him that I’m so ugly and stupid, the way I feel with everybody else. He likes to hear me talk, and when he looks at me I don’t feel as if he was saying to himself, ‘What an ugly girl she is, anyway.’ But I feel that he doesn’t know whether I’m pretty or ugly. He only knows he loves me the way I am.” She burst into wild tears, and before her mother could answer or arrest her, had brushed past her and fled up the next flight of stairs, the sound of her sobs floating down from the upper darkness to the listener’s ears. Bessie retreated into the boudoir and shut the door. Maud ran on and burst into her own room, there to throw herself on the bed and weep despairingly for hours. She thought of her lover, the one human being besides her brother who had never made her feel her inferiority, and lying limp and shaken among the pillows, thought, with a wild thrill of longing of the time when she would be free to creep into his arms and hide the ugly face he found so satisfactory upon his heart. In the morning, before she was up, Bessie visited her and renewed the conversation of the night before. Poor Maud, with a throbbing head and heavy eyes, lay helpless, answering questions that probed the tender secrets of the clandestine courtship, which had been to her an oasis of almost terrifying happiness in the lonely repression of her life. Finally, unable longer to endure her mother’s sarcastic allusions to Latimer’s disingenuousness, she sprang out of bed and ran into the bath-room, which was part of the suite she occupied. Here she turned on both taps, the sound of the rushing water completely drowning her mother’s voice, and sitting on the side of the tub, looked drearily down into the bath, while Bessie’s concluding and indignant sentences rose from the outer side of the door.