"And it's all your doing, Miss Beatrice," he
went on, turning to her with an elaborate bow. "You should be very
proud of your work."
She looked him straight in the face. They were in the new ballroom of
the clubhouse which the Rajah of Marut had just opened. In the
adjacent tearoom she heard voices raised in gay discussion, but for
the moment they were quite alone.
"You give me more credit in the matter than I deserve," she said. "Is
that generosity on your part, or--are you shirking your share of the
responsibility?"
"I--shirk my share of the responsibility!" he exclaimed with a
good-tempered lifting of the eyebrows. "My dear lady, have you ever
known me to do such a thing?"
She smiled rather sarcastically.
"No, Mr. Travers, but I own that the idea does not seem to me wholly
impossible."
"And even if you were right, why should I in this particular case
'shirk the responsibility,' as you put it? Surely it is not
responsibility we have incurred, but gratitude."
She walked by his side over to the open windows which looked out on to
the as yet uncultivated and barren gardens.
"The question is this," she said at last: "Does the superficial
gratitude of a crowd in any way compensate for the fact that, in order
to obtain it, a whole life's happiness has been incidentally
sacrificed?"
"I know to whom you are alluding," he said, looking earnestly at her,
"although, as a matter of fact, the two things have nothing to do with
each other, except in your imagination.
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