"I thought it for the best to tell your mother, Austin," said Katherine, somewhat apologetically. "We were speaking of you--and--I couldn't keep it back." Viviette, white-lipped and dazed, looked at Austin, Katherine, and Dick in turns. She said, in the high-pitched voice, to Austin: "Have you asked Katherine to marry you?" "Yes," he replied, not quite so confidently, and avoiding her glance--"and she has done me the honour of accepting me." Katherine held out a conciliatory hand to Viviette. "Won't you congratulate me, dear?" "And Austin, too," said Mrs. Ware. But Viviette lost control of herself. "I'll congratulate nobody," she cried shrilly. She burned with a sense of intolerable outrage. Only a few hours before she had been befooled into believing herself to be the mistress of the destinies of two men. Both had offered her their love. Both had kissed her. The memory lashed her into fury. Now one of them avowed that she had been merely the object of a drunken passion, and the other came before her as the affianced husband of the woman who called herself her dearest friend. Katherine, in deep distress, laid her hand on the girl's arm. "Why not, dear? I thought that you and Dick--in fact--I understood--" Viviette freed herself from Katherine's touch. "Oh, no, you didn't. You didn't understand anything. You didn't try to. You are all lying. The three of you. You have all lied, and lied, and lied to me. I tell you to your faces you have lied to me." She swung passionately to each in turn. "'Austin can never be anything to me but a friend'--how often have you said that to me? Ah--Saint Nitouche! And you"--to Austin--"How dared you insult me this morning? And you--how have you dared to insult me all the time? You've lied--the whole lot of you--and I hate you all!" Mrs. Ware had risen, scared and trembling. "What does the girl mean? I've never heard such unladylike words in a drawing-room in my life." Dick blundered in: "It's all my fault, mother--" "I've not the slightest doubt of that," returned the old lady with asperity. "But what Austin and Katherine have to do with it I can't imagine." The servant opened the door. "Lord Banstead." He entered a cold, strange silence. Everyone had forgotten him. He must have attributed the ungenial atmosphere to his own lateness--it was half-past eight--for he made penitent apology to Mrs. Ware. Austin greeted him coldly. Dick nodded absently from the other side of the room. Viviette, with a sweeping glance of defiance at the assembled family, held herself very erect, and with hard eyes and quivering lips came straight to the young fellow. "Lord Banstead," she said. "You have asked me four times to marry you. Did you mean it, or were you lying, too?" Banstead's pallid cheeks flushed. He was overcome with confusion. "Of course I mean it--meant to ask you again to-day--ask you now." "Then I will marry you."