"I seem to have known you very little all my life," said Hubert bitterly. "I certainly do not understand you now. What can you get by staying here?"
"Oh, nothing, of course!" she answered tranquilly.
"What is your scheme, Florence?"
"It is of no use telling you—you might interfere again."
The anguish of doubt and anxiety in his dark eyes, if she had looked at him, would surely have moved her. But she did not look.
"I mean to stay here," she said quietly, "teaching Enid Vane, putting up with aunt Leonora's impertinences as well as I can, until I get another chance in the world. What that chance may be of course I cannot tell, but I am certain that it will come."
"You can bear to stay in this house which I—I—infinitely less blameworthy than yourself—can hardly endure to enter?"
"The world would not call you less blameworthy. I am glad that you are so far on good terms with your conscience."
"Florence," he said, almost threateningly, "take care! I will not spare you another time. If I find you involved in any other transaction of which you ought to be ashamed, I will expose you. I will tell the world the truth—that you were on the point of leaving England with Sydney Vane when I—when I——"
"When you shot him," she said, without a trace of emotion manifest in either face or voice, "and let Andrew Westwood bear the blame."