"And you take it for granted I care for Mr. Kerr?"
"Oh, no, no!" He pushed his hand through his hair with an irascible gesture. "But it's plain enough you like him--you women always like a fellow that flourishes--but that's not the sort of man I care to see hanging around my girl."
Flora stood leaning on the table, breathing a little hurriedly, feeling rather as if she had been shaken. Harry, standing with his hands in his pockets, looked not unlike the threatening image he had appeared in the back of the goldsmith's shop.
"Of course, the fellow can talk," he admitted, "and he has a manner. But Lord knows where he comes from or who he is. Why, even the Bullers don't know."
Flora turned sharply on him. "Who told you that?"
"The judge. He picked him up at the club."
"Well," she kept it up, "some one had to introduce him there."
Harry smiled. "You wouldn't care to bow to some of those club members."
"Harry, do you know how you sound to me?" She was trembling at the daring of what she was going to say. "You talk as if you knew something against him."
Her statement seemed to bring him up short. "No, no, I don't," he said hastily.
She made a little gesture of despair. How was she to count on Harry if he was going to behave like this? How trust him when he was shuffling so?
She made one more bold stroke to make him speak out.
"Harry, you _do_ know something about him! I know you have seen him before."
"Why, yes, I've seen him before. But that's got nothing to do with it."
He looked surprised that she should seem to accuse him of it, and she wondered if he could have forgotten how he had denied it before.
The devil's tattoo that he beat on his hat stopped.
"Well, dislike him, then. When was it that you saw him before?"
"Isn't it enough for me to tell you that I don't want _you_ to see him?"
"Oh!" She turned away from him. Every nerve in her was in revolt. Then he really wasn't going to tell her anything. He was keeping her out of it as if she were a child. She had relied on him to return the ring. She had counted upon his indifference and good nature. And he was neither indifferent nor good-natured. All desire of even mentioning the ring to him left her; and as to giving him her confidence--These hints that he had thrown out about Kerr--they might be mere jealousy--but he might have actual knowledge, knowledge that, with her own fitted to it, would make for him a complete figure. She caught her breath at the thought of how near she had come to actually betraying Kerr. Until that moment she had not realized that through all her waverings her one fixed intention had been not to betray him.