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592 "Have I called you any such name?" she asked, turning and looking at him with a full, calm, arraigning directness.

Demotte shrugged his shoulders. "Oh, no—not in words. But you have meant it; you have meant it beyond the shadow of a doubt."

"What tells you that?" she exclaimed, with a little despairing gesture, as she turned to me.

"My conscience," he said.

She sank on the sofa again.

"I thought Floyd's tyranny," I ventured, "was quite a thing of the past, if you will pardon my having an opinion at all on a subject which does not concern me." These words were addressed to Millicent, though I made them loud enough easily to be overheard by her husband.

"It does concern you!" Millicent cried, with a sort of good-natured irritability. "Why should it not? It's your fault, Douglas, if the subject has no interest for you."

"Yes," struck in Demotte, coming a little in my direction and watching me with an intent scrutiny. "Millicent is right. It's your fault."

I looked from one to the other of them with wonder. I let myself say the first thing that rose to my lips—perhaps because this very wonder compelled me. "So, then," I faltered, "there is no real quarrel?"

"Quarrel!" exclaimed Millicent. She instantly rose, went over to Demotte, and threw both arms about him, kissing him on the forehead. "How could there be a quarrel between Floyd and me?" she continued, while crossing the room again to within a short distance of where I stood. "Don't you know us better than that? Surely, Douglas Duane, you ought to know us better. We have simply found out to-night just how much we love each other—nothing else!"

"Ah!" I said, with a gravity that was no doubt as colorless as I sought to make it.

Demotte laughed uneasily. "It's this," he said, "this and this only: I happened to give my wife a kiss when I saw how pretty she looked in that pink silk, and to tell her that we somehow used to be better friends in the old days than we are now. I may have said it with a touch of rather testy sarcasm; I"

"He did nothing of the sort!" asseverated Millicent, lifting one hand repellingly toward him as if to wave away the credibility of his announcement. "He said it with a voice as kind and sweet as any that he ever used. But something in his voice pierced me with—with contrition. Yes, that's just the word for it—contrition!" Here her voice broke, and she caught her breath, as if in the effort to make thorough tranquillity the dignified key-note of her discourse.

"Millicent!" her husband now struck in, reproachfully and admonishingly.

She wheeled herself toward him for a moment, and then turned again to me. "Don't mind what he says," she swiftly proceeded. "He has been martyrizing himself all this time. I have seen it and known it—and I have behaved like . . well, like a selfish creature!"

"You!" I murmured. It seemed to me that with her flushed face and her richly gleaming eyes, with the thread of diamonds about her