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Rh Ffrench could only stare at him.

"I went to the house," he said, "and asked for her." (He did not say for whom, nor was it necessary that he should. Ffrench understood him perfectly.) "I swear I saw her standing at the window as I went up the path. She had a purple dress on—and a white flower in her hair—and Saint Méran was at her side. Before, the man at the door never waited for me to speak; this time he stood and looked at me. I said, 'I want to see Miss Ffrench;' he answered, 'She is not at home.' 'Not at home,'"—breaking into a rough laugh,—"'not at home' to me!"

He clinched his fist and dashed it against the chair.

"What does it mean?" he cried out. " What does it mean?"

Ffrench quaked.

"I—I don't know," he answered, and his own face gave him the lie.

Murdoch caught his words up and flung them back at him.

"You don't know!" he cried. "Then I will tell you. It means that she has been playing me false from first to last."

Ffrench felt his position becoming weaker and weaker. Here was a state of affairs he had never seen before; here was a madness which concealed nothing, which defied all, which flung all social presuppositions to the winds. He ought to have been able to palter and equivocate, to profess a well-bred surprise and some delicate indignation, to be dignified and subtle; but he was not. He could only sit and wonder what would come next, and feel uncomfortable and alarmed. The thing which came next he had not expected any more than he had expected the rest of the outbreak.