"
"It isn't any reason at all. I should be fond of you anyway. Why, even
if you made a guy of me before everybody as you did to-night of that
clerical thing"--
"Stop!" Berenice interrupted, her color rising and her eyes shining. "I
will not have you speak of Mr. Wynne in that way. What I did was bad
enough."
"Berenice," demanded Stanford, regarding her keenly, "do you mean to
marry _him_?"
"You have no right to ask me whom I mean to marry! I am not going to
marry you, at least!"
"A clergyman. A man in petticoats! Well, I must say"--
She drew herself up to her full height, looking at him with anger and
excitement in her heart so great that they seemed to choke her.
"Do you see this?" she asked, holding up the little mask dangling from
her finger. "I fastened this to his cassock to-night. I insulted him in
the sight of everybody. Does that look as if"--
"Is that the same mask?" broke in Stanford. "You begged it of me
afterward!"
She could not command her voice to reply. Shame, grief, indignation,
struggled in her heart; yet her strongest conscious feeling was a
determination that the tears in her eyes should not fall.
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