Just now, his acquaintance with her, combined with all the other extraordinary results of his sailing on the _Mauretania_, was putting him to the torture; and he was gloomily convinced that nothing would ever make things come right; nevertheless, he was dimly, subconsciously aware even in this bitter moment that he wouldn't choose release from torture at the price of not knowing the girl.
"All this is a surprise to you, then?" her voice broke into the midst of his reflections over the newspaper cutting.
"How very odd that you didn't read the papers," exclaimed Lesley.
"I was so disgusted with the way New York was treating me that I wasn't very keen to see what it was saying of me. Besides, as I told you, I thought I _did_ know. I supposed it was all about the hotel fuss, and my knocking down that man Milton."
"I slapped him in the face, and he fell down."
"Well," said Lesley, looking at him always from under her lashes to see how he was taking her words, "you've been dreadfully punished, at all events."
"I don't think I deserved punishment for that."
"Don't you? Of course I don't know anything about _that_, but you used to be--well, rather arrogant."
"I'm not arrogant now." Loveland smiled faintly. "I'm almost inclined to think I never shall be again."
"Not really----" He almost gasped, as he would have repeated her words. It had not occurred to him, even while he read the cutting, that Lesley Dearmer could possibly think him a fraud. "What--you--you--don't believe in me?" he stammered. "_You?_"
Apparently she was untouched by the reproach, the actual consternation in his voice.
"Why should _I_ believe, more than anyone else?" she asked with a little dainty, sidewise turn of her head. "I was only a ship acquaintance, you know--like the others."
"Like the others who threw me over," he said.
"Yes, like the others. There was no difference--was there?" she challenged him.
But Loveland was in no mood to take up the gauntlet, if it were a gauntlet that she threw down.
"I suppose not," he answered from the depths.
"You valued almost all your other acquaintances on board more than you did me," the girl went on. "You were quite frank about that. By your own admission, you were a bit of an adventurer, coming over to my country to see what you could devour. I used to hate that in you--all the more because I thought you a _titled_ adventurer. There was less excuse for a well brought up man, with every advantage of birth and education, than for----"