She was looking up at him with the faintest shadow of a smile lurking in the depths of the alluring eyes. And her lips were no longer tremulous when she said: "Oh, no, you don't; I know just how you feel; you are excited, and--and impulsive, and there's a sort of getting-ready-to-be-grateful feeling roaming around in you, and all that. If I were as mean as some people think I am, I might take advantage of all this, mightn't I? But I sha'n't. Won't you open the door and let me go? It's _very_ important."
"Heavens, Margery! don't make a joke of it!" he burst out. "Can't you see that I mean it? Girl, girl, I want you--I need you!"
This time she laughed outright. Then she grew suddenly grave.
"My dear friend, you don't know what you are saying. The gate that you are trying to break down opens upon nothing but misery and wretchedness. If I loved you as a woman ought to love her lover, for your sake and for my own I should still say no--a thousand times no! Now will you open the door and let me go?"
He turned and fumbled for the door-knob like a man in a daze.
"Don't you--don't you think you might learn to--to think of me in that way?--after a while?" he pleaded.
He had opened the door a little way, and she slipped past him. But in the corridor she turned and laughed at him again.
"I am going to cure you--you, personally, as well as the sick situation--Mr. Raymer," she said flippantly. Then, mimicking him as a spoiled child might have done: "I might possibly learn to--think of you--in that way--after a while. But I could never, never, _never_ learn to love your mother and your sister."
And with that spiteful thrust she left him.
As it chanced, Jasper Grierson was in the act of concluding a long and apparently satisfactory telephone conversation with his agent in Duluth at the moment when the door of his private room opened and his daughter entered.
As on a former occasion, she went to sit in the window until the way to free speech should be open, and she could not well help hearing the closing words of the long-distance conference.
"You sit tight in the boat; that's all you've got to do," her father was saying. "Keep the young fellow with you as long as you can; the other man is too sick to talk business, right now. When you can't hold the young one any longer, let me know. We'll play the hand out as it lays. Get that? I say, we'll play the hand out as it lays."