“I decline to enter into an unbefitting altercation with you, Maurice. Your friend is obviously in love with your wife, and Felicia allows him to be too much with her.”
“Is this pure imagination on your part? I know, of course, that there’s never been any love lost between you and Geoffrey.”
“I have been warned,” said Mr. Merrick, reluctant, yet with redoubled dignity.
Maurice’s smouldering nerves struck to flame, and an ugly illumination glared at him. “This can be no one but Angela,” he said.
It was difficult to keep dignity under eyes that seemed to take him by the throat; in the struggle to look firmly back Mr. Merrick was silent.
“Come. Own to it. The venomous liar!” Maurice added in a low voice, studying the revelations of the other’s wrathful helplessness.
“I have no wish to deny it, and I must forbid you to speak in that manner of a woman who honours you by calling you her friend.”
“I know Angela better than you do,” Maurice laughed. His fury almost passed away from its derivative object.
“The fact remains that people talk, and that truest kindness warned me of it.”
“If people talk it’s she who makes them. I’ve known—ever since I married her—that Geoffrey loved Felicia.” Maurice flung him the truth scornfully.