"The explanation of your conduct in the other room is only one of the explanations which you owe me.

You have something else to account for.

Let us begin with _that_, if you please." She looked at him in unaffected surprise.
"What else have I to account for ?" she asked.
He again repeated his reply to Lady Janet.
"I have told you already," he said.

"I don't understand your confidential relations with Julian Gray." Mercy's color rose; Mercy's eyes began to brighten.
"Don't return to that!" she cried, with an irrepressible outbreak of disgust.

"Don't, for God's sake, make me despise you at such a moment as this!" His obstinacy only gathered fresh encouragement from that appeal to his better sense.
"I insist on returning to it." She had resolved to bear anything from him--as her fit punishment for the deception of which she had been guilty.