“Oh, my dear, my dear!” he seriocomically deplored.  “Why, because it was such a noble thing to do.  It was so like the estimable young man in a play, you know, who acknowledges the crime he never committed and takes a curtain-call immediately afterwards.  In fine, I simply observed to myself, with the late Monsieur de Bergerac, ‘But what a gesture!’” And he parodied an actor’s motion in this role.

She stayed unsmiling and patiently awaiting veracity.  Anne did not understand that Colonel Musgrave was telling the absolute truth.  And so,

“You haven’t any sense of humor,” he lamented.  “You used to have a deal, too, before you took to being conscientiously cheerful, and diffusing sweetness and light among your cowering associates.  Well, it was because it helped him a little.  Oh, I am being truthful now.  I had some reason to dislike Jack Charteris, but odd as it is, I know to-day I never did.  I ought to have, perhaps.  But I didn’t.”

“My friend, you are being almost truthful.  But I want the truth entire.”

“It isn’t polite to disbelieve people,” he reproved her; “or at the very least, according to the best books on etiquette, you ought not to do it audibly.  Would you mind if I smoked?  I could be more veracious then.  There is something in tobacco that makes frankness a matter of course.  I thank you.”

He produced an amber holder, fitted a cigarette into it, and presently inhaled twice.  He said, with a curt voice: 

“The reason, naturally, was you.  You may remember certain things that happened just before John Charteris came and took you.  Oh, that is precisely what he did!  You are rather a narrow-minded woman now, in consequence—­or in my humble opinion, at least—­and deplorably superior.  It pleased the man to have in his house—­if you will overlook my venturing into metaphor,—­one cool room very sparsely furnished where he could come when the mood seized him.  He took the raw material from me, wherewith to build that room, because he wanted that room.  I acquiesced, because I had not the skill wherewith to fight him.”

Anne understood him now, as with a great drench of surprise.  And fear was what she felt in chief when she saw for just this moment as though it had lightened, the man’s face transfigured, and tender, and strange to her.

“I tried to buy your happiness, to—­yes, just to keep you blind indefinitely.  Had the price been heavier, I would have paid it the more gladly.  Fate has played a sorry trick. You would never have seen through him.  My dear, I have wanted very often to shake you,” he said.

And she knew, in a glorious terror, that she desired him to shake her, and as she had never desired anything else in life.

“Oh, well, I am just a common, ordinary, garden-sort of fool.  The Musgraves always are, in one fashion or another,” he sulkily concluded.  And now the demigod was merely Rudolph Musgrave again, and she was not afraid any longer, but only inexpressibly fordone.