Margaret laughed, leaned back in her chair and looked at the pond.
'Some one you don't know?' she repeated, with a question.
'I wonder!' She laughed again. 'It must be that,' she said presently. 'It cannot be anything else.'
'It must be "Cordova." Don't you think so? I know just what you mean--I feel it, I hear it in my voice when I speak, I see it in the glass when I look at myself. But not always. It comes and it goes, it has its hours. Sometimes I'm it when I wake up suddenly in the night, and sometimes I'm Margaret Donne, whom you used to like. And I'm sure of something else. Shall I tell you? One of these days Margaret Donne will go away and never come back, and there will be only Cordova left, and then I suppose I shall go to the bad. They all do, you know.'
Lushington did know, and made an odd movement and bent himself, as if something sharp had run into him unawares, and he turned his face away, to hide the look of pain which he could not control. Margaret had hardly spoken the cruel words when she realised what she had done.
'Oh, I'm so sorry!' she cried, in dreadful distress, and the voice came from her heart and was quite her own again.
In her genuine pain for him, she took his hand in both her own, and drew it to her and looked into his eyes.
'It's all right,' he answered. 'You did not mean it. Don't distress yourself.'
There were tears in her eyes now, but they were not going to overflow. She dropped his hands.
'How splendidly good and generous you are!' Margaret cried. 'There's nobody like you, after all!'
Lushington forgot his pain in the pleasure he felt at this outburst.
'But why?' he asked, not very clear as to her reasons for praising him.
'It was the same thing the other day,' she said, 'when we upset you on the Versailles road. You were in a bad way; I don't think I remember ever seeing a man in a worse plight! I couldn't help laughing a little.'
'No,' said Lushington, 'I suppose you couldn't.'
'You had your revenge afterwards, though you did not know it,' Margaret answered.
'Monsieur Logotheti was detestable. It would have given me the greatest satisfaction to have stuck hat-pins into him, ever so many of them, as thick as the quills on a porcupine!'
'As you say, I was revenged,' he answered.