Her composure was greater than his. He had expected her to fly at him with abuse. Something in her manner egged him on to say more:
"You may pull the wool over my father's eyes, but you have never deceived me. You have been waiting for years for him to die, hoping every illness would finish him, so that you could spend his money. Well, he's not dead yet. Suppose, after all, you found he had altered his will? It's not too late for that; he could get a solicitor here in an hour, and he would do it, too, if he knew what had gone on here to-night. Oh, don't misunderstand me, I don't want him to know, for his own peace of mind. As long as you behave yourself decently inside his house you are safe from me. But this sort of thing has got to stop. That's all."
As he turned to go he glanced at her again. She was almost unrecognisable. Her eyes had narrowed to slits, her cheekbones showed an unexpected prominence under their patches of red. One hand fumbled and twisted the heavy pearls at her throat; he could hear her laboured breathing. How she was going to hate him now! The thought suddenly came to him that if there had been a revolver or a knife handy she would have tried to use it on him. Well, he had the upper hand of her; that was all that mattered. She could hate him as much as she chose….
He left her standing there, staring after him fixedly. Once outside, he had to admit he had taken a pretty strong line. Of course, in a way it was not his business to issue ultimatums of this sort. Yet he would have done the same again. The thought that his aunt or Esther Rowe might easily have come upon the scene he had just interrupted filled him with rage. Of course, from now on it was going to be still more difficult to remain under the same roof with Thérèse; it would require a skin thicker than his to endure it. Still, it would not be for long.
When he reached his room he discovered with a reaction of amusement that he still held the bottle of Evian water upright in the crook of his arm. There it had been throughout the foregoing passage at arms. He laughed, and his anger began to recede. Still, he could not sleep, and it was three o'clock when he put out his light. As he did so he listened to a faint sound outside.
It was Thérèse, who, only after this long time, was coming upstairs to bed.
CHAPTER XIX
Of the foregoing incident Esther remained in total ignorance. Accordingly, when next morning she heard Lady Clifford's maid, Aline, say that her mistress had had a bad night and was indisposed in consequence, it meant nothing special to her. She had come to regard the beautiful Frenchwoman as spoiled and self-indulgent, prone, like many others of her type, to exaggerate trifling ailments—though she concluded that the explanation of this tendency lay in the boredom of the woman's daily life. If she had been indulging in a round of gaiety she would have proved equal to enormous exertion, but there is a vast difference between dancing all night and lying awake in bed. Esther knew that fact well.
At about twelve o'clock the doctor sent Esther with a message to Lady Clifford. It seemed Sir Charles had been asking for her. The voice that called out "Entrez!" in reply to Esther's knock sounded sharp and strained.
Lady Clifford was sitting before her rather elaborate dressing-table, partly dressed, wrapped in a peignoir of heavy white crêpe. The face she turned upon Esther was pale and shadowed about the eyes, the lips tightly compressed. She really did look ill.