"What an odd smell of drugs!" she exclaimed, standing on the threshold. It seemed to take her back years, that pungent odour, to the schoolroom--when she went into the schoolmistress' little medicine-room to be physicked.
"I am very sorry, but I happen to be on sufferance in these rooms--their real tenant is a medical student, who has got leave because of a series of catastrophes in his family. Look here! This looks like business, doesn't it?"
He opened a cupboard door, and she saw a skeleton hanging on a peg. "Oh!" she cried, shrinking back.
He laughed. "I thought you were strong minded," he said. "But somehow I am rather glad you are not. But you are not going to stand there all the evening, are you, because there are a few harmless bones in the cupboard? There are worse things in creation than skeletons!" He spoke meaningly.
She watched him as he seated himself in a revolving chair by a writing table. There was a certain insolence in his manner and tone, as well as in his depreciatory stare, as he gazed slightingly at her and twisted his small black moustache. A diamond twinkled on his little finger.
Somehow she took courage from his shallow, careless attitude--and she was strongly stirred by a wild idea that flashed upon her. She would make use of her own scheme with Vansittart to cajole him into waiting until the mine was sprung, and he had lost her for ever!
"I am not strong-minded, more's the pity, or I should not be here to-night," she said, firmly, and she entered and seated herself opposite him, once more mistress of herself and her emotions. "Why not? Because I should have been with you long ago, if I'd had the spirit some women have!"
"You would--have followed me?" he asked, a little taken back, puzzled.
"I would! Because I believed in you!" she said, honestly. "I thought you more sinned against than sinning!"
"That is right! A woman's first duty is to believe in her husband," he exclaimed, leering at her.