"My mother died," she began, "eight months after our engagement, and then I went out to Poonah on a visit to my uncle. It is just a year and a half since I started."
"Yea! I remember. I did not want you to go."
"And I insisted. You know why now."
"Yes! I know why now."
Gordon repeated her words with a shiver. If only he had understood her a little better, he thought.
Kate hardly noticed his interruption. She was staring straight into the fire and speaking in a dull monotone, with no spring in her voice. She would have spared him now, had she been able, but she felt irresistibly impelled to lay all her disloyalty bare before his eyes--to show him at how empty a shrine he had been worshipping. It seemed to her almost as if some stronger will was prompting her, and the very sound of her words was thin and strange to her ears, as though some one else was speaking them at a great distance.
"Yes," she continued, "I wanted to get away from you--to slip out of my shackles for a time. So I went to Poonah, and--and there I found Austen."
"Austen! Austen!" Gordon burst out in a frenzy. "For God's sake, don't call him that!" and he brought his clenched fist down on the table with all his strength. The glasses on it rattled at the blow, and the tumbler which Hawke had used, standing close at the edge, fell and splintered on the floor. Gordon laughed at the sight.
"That was his glass," he explained. "He was here to-night, drinking with me," and he laughed again, harshly.
The girl hurriedly drew her skirts away from the broken fragments.