"How dare you allude to that shameful episode in your life," he said sternly, "and to me, of all people!"
"If not to you, I should certainly speak of it to no one," she answered quietly. There was a sudden blaze of light in the red-brown eyes beneath the heavily-veined eyelids.
"You are my only safety-valve; I must speak sometimes—or die. Besides"—in a still lower tone—"I see nothing shameful about it. We have done no harm. If he loved me better than he loved his chattering commonplace little wife, I was not to blame. How could I help it if I loved him too? It was kismet—it had to be. You should not have interfered."
"And pray what would have happened if I had not interfered? What shame, what ruin, what disgrace!"
"It is useless for you to rant and rave in that manner," said Florence Lepel, letting her eyes drop once more to the open pages of her French novel. "You did interfere, and there is an end of it. And what an end! You must be proud of your work. He dead, Marion dying, the General nearly mad with grief, the man Westwood hanged for a crime that he never committed!"
"Westwood has been reprieved," said Hubert sharply.
"What a relief to you!" commented his sister, with almost incredible coolness.
He turned away from her, catching at his throat as if something rose to choke him there. His face was very pale; the lines of pain about his eyes and mouth were plainer and deeper than they had been before. Florence glanced up at him and smiled faintly. There was a strange malignity in her smile.
"You can tell me," she said, when the silence had lasted for some minutes, "what you meant by saying that the General would not find me here to-day."
"He has narrowly escaped a fit of apoplexy. He is to be kept quiet; he will not be able to see any one for some days to come."