There are few greater trials to a man's dignity than vituperation from the lips of a woman. She walked towards him, clumsily, menacingly and raised her hand as if to strike him.
Seymour Michael's brown face turned yellow beneath her blazing anger.
"Sit down!" he commanded, "and don't make a fool of yourself."
He was mean enough to pay her back in her own coin--the paltry, loud-ringing coin which is all that a woman has.
"I do not mean to wrangle," he said coolly; "but I may as well tell you now that I never cared a jot for you. I was laughing at you in my sleeve all the time. I did not want you but your money. I concluded that the money would be too dear at the price, so I determined to throw you over. The way I chose to do it was as good as any other, because it saved me the trouble of writing to you."
Anna Agar had obeyed him. She was sitting down in a stiff-backed arm-chair, looking stupidly at the pattern of the carpet as if it were something new to her. Between physical pain and mental excitement she was beginning to wander. She was the sort of woman to lose control over her mind with a temperature of one hundred and one.
Michael looked keenly at her. He had a racial terror of physical ailment. He saw that something was wrong, but his knowledge went no further. He had never seen a woman faint, so limited had been his experience of the sex.
"Come," he said consolingly, "it is all for the best. We made a mistake. In a few years we shall look back to this, and thank Heaven for saving us many years of unhappiness. We are not suited to each other, Anna. We never should have been happy."
It was characteristic of the man to be more afraid of a fainting fit than of a broken heart.
He went to her side and stood, not daring to touch her, for fear of arousing another of those fits of passion in her which neither of them seemed to understand. At length she spoke in a singular monotonous tone which an experienced doctor would have recognised at once as the speech of a tongue unguided for the time being. She did not look up, but kept her eyes fixed on the carpet as if reading there.
"Some day," she said, "I will pay you back. Some day--some day. I do not know how, but I feel that you will be sorry you ever did this."