"You had yourself alone to thank for it," she declared with indignation. "If--if you hadn't interfered and behaved intolerably, it wouldn't have happened."
"What a naïve way of expressing it!" said Max. "Shall I tell you how I regard the 'happening'?"
"You can do as you like," she flung back. She was longing to go, but stood her ground lest departure should look like flight.
Max took out and lighted another cigarette before he spoke again. Then: "I regard it," he said very deliberately, "as a piece of spiteful mischief for which you deserve a sound whipping--which it would give me immense pleasure to administer."
Olga's pale face flamed scarlet. Her eyes flashed up to his in fiery disdain.
"You!" she said, with withering scorn. "You!"
Carelessly, his hands in his pockets, Max put the question. Quite obviously he did not care in the smallest degree what answer she made. And so Olga, being stung to rage by his unbearable superiority, cast scruples to the wind.
"I'd do the same to you again--and worse," she declared vindictively, "if I got the chance!"
Max smiled at that superciliously, one corner of his mouth slightly higher than the other. "Oh, no, you wouldn't," he said. "For one thing, you wouldn't care to run the risk of having to sew me up again. And for another, you wouldn't dare!"
"Not dare! Do you think I am afraid of you?"
Olga stood in a streak of sunlight that slanted through the wire blind of the doctor's surgery and fell in chequers upon her white dress. Her pale eyes fairly blazed. No one who had ever seen her thus would have described her as colourless. She was as vivid in that moment as the flare of the sunset; and into the eyes of the man who leaned against the table coolly appraising her there came an odd little gleam of satisfaction--the gleam that comes into the eyes of the treasure-hunter at the first glint of gold.
Olga came a step towards him. She saw the gleam and took it for ridicule. The situation was intolerable. She would be mocked no longer.
"Dr. Wyndham," she said, her voice pitched rather low, "do you call yourself a gentleman?"
"I really don't know," he answered. "It's a question I've never asked myself."
"Because," she said, speaking rather quickly, "I think you a cad."