Win had always thought “How dare you?” a very silly expression, no matter what the provocation.  Yet now she was tempted to use it.  Only her subconscious sense of humour, which warned her it would be ridiculous from Peter Rolls’s “saleslady” to Peter Rolls himself, made her bite back the words that rushed to the end of her tongue.

“You have a strange idea of putting things delicately!” she cried.  “You offer me a reward if I—­if I—­oh, I can’t say it!”

“I can,” volunteered the old man coolly.  “And I’ll tell you just how much I offer.  Maybe that’ll help your talking apparatus.  I’ll give you ten thousand dollars.  Wouldn’t that be something like making your fortune in New York?”

“If it were ten millions it would make no difference,” the girl flung at him.  “I—–­”

“Say, you set a high value on my son Peter.  But if he marries you, my girl, he won’t be worth any millions, or even thousands, I tell you straight.  He won’t be worth a red cent.  You’d better pick up my offer while it’s going, and drop Peter.  Maybe with ten thousand dollars of your own, one of your young cousins, the earls, might find you worth while.”

Never had Win even dreamed that it was possible for a human soul so to boil with anger as hers had now begun to boil.  She wanted to scald this hateful old man with burning spray from the geyser.  At last she understood the rage which could kill.  Yet it was in a low, restrained voice that she heard herself speaking.

“Please don’t go on,” she warned him.  “I suppose you don’t quite realize how hideously you’re insulting me.  A man who could say such things wouldn’t.  And only such a man could misunderstand—­could think that instead of refusing his money I was bidding for more.  I wanted to say that you could save your son and your pocket, too.  Neither are in danger from me.”

“That ain’t the way the boy feels about it,” Peter senior slipped the words in slyly.  “If he did, I wouldn’t have sent for you.”

This was the last drop in the cup.

“What?” cried the girl, towering over the shrunken figure in the revolving chair. “Your son asked you to send for me?  Then he’s as bad, as cruel, as you are.”

A red wave of rage swept over her.  She no longer knew what she was saying.  Her one wish—­her one object in life, it seemed just then—­was to hurt both Peters.

“I hate him!” she exclaimed.  “Everything I’ve heard about him is true, after all.  He’s a false friend and a false lover—­a dangerous, cruel man to women, just as I was warned he was.”

“Stop right there,” broke in Peter’s father.  “That’s damn nonsense, and you know it.  Nobody ever warned you that my boy was anything of the kind.”

“I was warned,” she beat him down, “that it was a habit of your son to win a girl’s confidence with his kind ways and then deceive her.”

“Then it was a damned lie, and no one but a damned fool would believe it,” shouted Peter Rolls, Sr.  “My boy a deceiver of women?  Why, he’s a Gala-what-you-may-call-it!  He’d die any death sooner than harm a woman.  I’m his father, and I know what I’m talking about.  Who the devil warned you?  Some beast, or some idiot?”