Esther looked back at her in that pained forbearance which clothed her like a transfiguring atmosphere. Then she drew a sharp breath.
"Jeff!" she said, turning to him.
The red had mounted to his forehead. He admired Lydia, and with some wild impulse of his own, loved her bravado.
"Oh, come, Lydia," he said. "We can't talk like that. If Esther means to be civil—"
Yet he did not think Esther meant to be civil. Only he was hard pushed between the two, and said the thing that came to him. But it came empty and went empty to them, and he knew it.
"She doesn't mean to be civil," said Lydia, still in her wicked enjoyment. "I don't know what she does mean, but it's not to be nice to me. And I don't know what she's come for—" here her old vision of Jeff languishing unvisited in the dungeon of her fancy rose suddenly before her and she ended hotly—"after all this time."
Again Esther turned to Jeff and spoke his name, as if summoning him in a situation she could not, however courageous, meet alone. But Lydia had thought of something else.
"I don't know what you can do to me," she said, "and I don't much care. Except for Farvie and Anne. But I know this. If you can arrest me for stealing from you something you'd stolen before, why then I shall say right off I did it. And when I do it, I shall tell all I know about the necklace and how you took it from Madame Beattie—and oh, my soul!" said Lydia, rising from her chair and putting her finger tips together in an unconsidered gesture, "there's Madame Beattie now."
Esther too rose, murder in her heart but still a solicitous sadness in her eyes, and turned, following Lydia's gaze, to the steps where Denny had drawn up and Madame Beattie was alighting from the victoria. Jeff, going forward to meet her, took courage since Denny was not driving away. Whatever Madame Beattie had come to do, she meant to make quick work of it.
"Jeff," said Esther, at his elbow, "Jeff, I must go. This is too painful for everybody. I can't bear it."