"Well, if you will forgive me—she asked me, in effect, when I was coming to marry you, and why I had kept the engagement a secret so long." He paused, one dark red blush, to note the effect of so brutal a stroke.
She said, meeting his eyes for the first time:
"And you believed it at once—of ME?"
"No, Miss Pennycuick. I laughed. I said to myself: 'Here is another of Miss Francie's mare's nests.' But when I read on—she told me so many things—they were incredible, but still I felt I had to sift the matter; and since I came up today, other people—I've been to Five Creeks and had a talk with Jim Urquhart—now I don't know what to think; at least, there is but one thing that I can think."
The chair she had taken had a high back, and against this she laid her head, as if too weary to support it. Lack of sleep and appetite had paled her florid colour to a sickly hue, and she looked wan and languid as a dying woman. But still he did not pity her, as he must have done had her face been half as beautiful as Deb's or Francie's.
"Miss Pennycuick," he continued, as she kept silence, "I want to get the hang of this thing. Will you tell me straight—yes or no—have you been giving it out that I left Redford two years ago engaged to you?"
Her first impulse was to cry out: "Oh, no, no! Not quite so bad as that!" But on second thoughts she said:
"Yes—practically."
Sudden rage seemed to seize him. He sat up, he crossed his knees, he uncrossed them, he twisted this way and that, he muttered "Good God!" as if the pious ejaculation had referred to the Other Person, and his stare at her was cruel.
"But—but—I have been racking my brains to remember anything—surely I never gave you—I am perfectly convinced, I have the best reason for being absolutely certain, that I could not have given you—"