forced upon her. The blood rushed to her head till cheeks and
shoulders and neck seemed to burn. Covering her face with her hands
she sank back on the seat crying silently bitter tears that seemed to
scald her eyes and her cheeks as they ran.

Leonard was angry. When it began to dawn upon him what was the
purpose of Stephen's speech, he had been shocked. Young men are so
easily shocked by breaches of convention made by women they respect!
And his pride was hurt. Why should he have been placed in such a
ridiculous position! He did not love Stephen in that way; and she
should have known it. He liked her and all that sort of thing; but
what right had she to assume that he loved her? All the weakness of
his moral nature came out in his petulance. It was boyish that his
eyes filled with tears. He knew it, and that made him more angry
than ever. Stephen might well have been at a loss to understand his
anger, as, with manifest intention to wound, he answered her:

'What a girl you are, Stephen. You are always doing something or
other to put a chap in the wrong and make him ridiculous. I thought
you were joking--not a good joke either! Upon my soul, I don't know
what I've done that you should fix on me! I wish to goodness--'

If Stephen had suffered the red terror before, she suffered the white
terror now. It was not injured pride, it was not humiliation, it was
not fear; it was something vague and terrible that lay far deeper
than any of these. Under ordinary circumstances she would have liked
to have spoken out her mind and given back as good as she got; and
even as the thoughts whirled through her brain they came in a torrent
of vague vituperative eloquence. But now her tongue was tied.
Instinctively she knew that she had put it out of her power to