“Illness,” said Deb.  “Madness.”

“Nonsense!  There’s too much method in it.  It is obviously but the climax of a long intrigue—­a course of duplicity that I could never have believed possible in a girl like Mary, although I have always thought him cad enough for anything.”

“Have your tea,” said Deb, a trifle off-hand; “it will be cold.”

And she sat down with her own cup, and began to sip it with a leisurely air.

“A clandestine marriage,” remarked Claud, ignoring her advice, “logically implies a clandestine engagement.  Carey was but a red herring across the trail.  And you ought to have known it, Deb.”

“Well, I didn’t,” said she shortly.

He took a turn up and down the room, trying to preserve his wonted well-bred calm.  But he was intensely irritated by her attitude.

“I cannot understand you,” he complained, with a hard edge to his voice.  “I should have thought that you—­you of all people—­would have been wild—­as wild as I am.”

She exasperated him with a little laugh and a truly cutting sarcasm.  “It is bad form to show that you are wild, you know, even if you feel so.”

“I am just wondering whether you feel so.  You are not used to hiding your feelings—­at any rate, from me.  I expected to find you out of your mind almost.”

“What’s the use?  If I raved till doomsday I couldn’t alter anything.  The mischief is done.  It is no use crying over spilt milk, my dear.”

“You look as if you did not want to cry.”  “Do I?”

“As if it did not much matter to you whether it was spilt or not.”  “It doesn’t matter to me, compared with what it matters to her.”  “Well, it matters to me,” Claud Dalzell announced, in a high tone, the crust of his fine manners giving to the pressure of the volcano within.  “I can’t stand the connection, if you can.  Carey was bad enough, but he had some claim beside his coat to rank as a gentleman.  This crawling ass, who would lick your boots for sixpence, to have him patting me on the back and calling himself my brother—­Good God! it’s too sickening.”

“Not your brother,” Deb gently corrected him.

“He is mine if he is yours.”  “Oh, not necessarily!”

“Deb,” said Claud, with an air of desperation, planting himself before her, “what are you going to do?”

She looked up at him with narrowing eyes and stiffening lips.

“What is there to do?” she returned.  “Are you going to put up with this —­this outrage—­to condone everything—­to tolerate that fellow at Redford, taking the position of a son of the house, or are you going to show them both that they have forfeited their right ever to set foot upon the place again?”

“My sister too, you mean?”

“Certainly—­if you can still bring yourself to call her your sister.  She belongs to him now, not to us.  She has voluntarily cut herself off from her world.  Let her go.  Deb, if you love me—­”