The Marquis turned the lamp a little lower with steady fingers. The necessity for his action was not altogether apparent.
"You suggest, Mr. Borden, if I understand you rightly," he said, "that I am now too old and too unintelligent to afford Marcia the stimulating companionship which her gifts deserve?"
"There can't be a great sympathy between you," the other declared, "and, to be brutal, the place in life which she deserves, and to which she aspires, is not open to her under present conditions."
"You allude, I presume," the Marquis said, "to the absence of any legal tie between Miss Hannaway and myself?"
"I do," Borden assented. "The world is a broad-minded place enough, but there are differences and backwaters--I am not here to explain them to you. I don't need to. Marcia Hannaway, married to her publisher, going where she will, thinking how she will, meeting whom she will, would be a different person to Miss Marcia Hannaway, living in isolation in Battersea, with nothing warm nor human in her life except--"
"Precisely," the Marquis interrupted, with a little gesture which might have concealed--anything. "I am beginning to grasp your point of view, Mr. Borden."
"I have no answer to give you, sir. You have made certain suggestions, which I may or may not be prepared to accept. In any case, matters of so much importance scarcely lend themselves to decisions between strangers. I shall probably allude to what you have said when I see or write Miss Hannaway."
"You've nothing more to say to me about it, then?" Borden persisted, a little wistfully.
"Nothing whatever! You may possibly consider my attitude selfish," the Marquis added, "but I find myself wholly indifferent to your interests in this matter."
"I should be able to reconcile myself even to that," was the grim reply, "if I have been able to penetrate for a single moment that accursed selfishness of yours--if I have been able to make you think, for however short a time, of Marcia's future instead of your own."
The Marquis rose without haste from his place, and rang the bell.
"You will permit me, Mr. Borden," he invited, "to offer you some refreshments?"
The Marquis pointed to the door, by which Gossett was standing.
"That, then, I think, concludes our interview," he said, with icy courtesy.