They left the reception-rooms, and she was silent when faces were no longer about them. She led him down a passage, across a book-filled room, a student’s lamp its only light, and softly turning the handle of a further door, opened it on the quiet of a little room, discreetly frivolous with the light gaiety of Louis XV decorations, empty of all significance but that of smiling background for gay confidences or pouting coquettries. Not exactly the background for such a scene as she and Maurice must enact, yet Angela triumphed in the contrast. Tragic desolation, splendid sincerities would gain value from their trivial setting. Her passion, her misery, would menace more strangely, implore more piteously among nymphs and garlands.
She dropped into a chair, and put out her hand to a jar of white azaleas. She asked no question, but she looked at him steadily. Maurice had closed the door and stood near it, his back to it, at a distance from her. The sound of the world outside—the world that smiled and pouted—was like the faint hum of a top.
“How have you dared warn my father-in-law against Geoffrey?” asked Maurice. He was nerved to any truth.
Angela made no reply, her long, deep eyes on him while, automatically, her hand passed over the azaleas.
“How could you betray my confidence in you? What a fool I was to trust you!”
“Betray you?” she murmured.
“You pursue me and my happiness!” Maurice cried, and hot tears of self-pity started to his eyes. Her eyes dropped. That his hand should deal this blow!
“I pursue you?—and your happiness, Maurice?” she repeated.
“Can you deny it? Since we came back to England you have been a poison in our lives.”
She was struggling with the moment’s dreadful bitterness. Over the bleeding pain of it her sense of his cruel injustice sustained her to a retort: “I have betrayed nothing. You are the only betrayer, Maurice. You betrayed my love; you betrayed your wife to me.”