Mr. Merrick rose unsteadily, putting down his tea-cup upon the table. “The scoundrel!” he said.
“Which one do you mean?”
“The scoundrel! I mean Maurice. She shall know him.”
Angela’s eyes glittered.
“I think it well that all the truth should be known,” she said.
CHAPTER XII
THAT evening, by special messenger, a note reached Angela. “Will you come to me,”—the words crossed the page with the swift steadiness of an arrow—“and repeat to me the calumnies that you have spoken to my father. I shall regard a refusal as a retractation.”
Angela traced her own answer with a deliberateness that savoured to her mind of unwavering benevolence. “I will be with you at eleven to-morrow morning. Do not think that I come as an enemy. Be as strong to hear the truth as I to speak it.”
She kept the boy waiting while she copied and re-copied the words into a larger, firmer script in which there should be no hint of threat or unsteadiness.
Between the sending of this acceptance of challenge and the hour of the interview next day Angela’s mind, like a wreck, was tossed from shuddering heights to engulfing abysses. Since the moment when she had crawled at Maurice’s feet her image of herself had been broken, unseizable. She no longer knew herself, she, the uplifter, a crouching suppliant. What she had further done—that final, passionate abandonment where vindictive fury, worship, and desperate appeal to the very rudiments of feeling were indistinguishably mingled,—she could not look at steadily. Yet, in swift glances as at something dazzling and appalling, she could just snatch a vision of a not ignoble Angela. There had been splendour in those hopeless kisses, a blinding splendour; she must veil her eyes from it.