“My return was inopportune.” The icy steadiness of her voice pleased her own sense of fitness. “Or opportune?” She directed her eyes upon Odd, and indeed his attitude assumed all the ignobility of the situation. He welcomed responsibility; to heap shame upon his own head was all he prayed for. With a kind of desperate sincerity he kept his arm around Hilda, and almost defiantly he had placed himself before her; he felt that Hilda’s look of frozen horror gave him the advantage.
“Opportune, Katherine,” he said; “now at least I shall not have to lie to you. You can see the whole extent of my baseness.”
“Such sudden baseness too. How long have we been engaged?”
It was good to turn on him those daggers of her own humiliation; to feel his disloyalty justify hers, nay, more than justify, give absolution, for she had not been disloyal, thinking he loved her.
“Katherine,” said Odd, “I can only beg you to believe that I have struggled—for your sake, for her sake. Until this evening I thought that neither of you would ever know the truth.”
This bracketing of Hilda’s injury with hers stank in Katherine’s nostrils. She controlled a quivering rage that ran through her, and, speaking a little more slowly for the tension she put upon herself—
“I can imagine no greater humiliation than the one you were so chivalrously preparing for me,” she said. “Marriage with an unloving man! I can imagine nothing more insulting. I deserved the truth from you, and how dared you think of degrading me by withholding it?” The white indignation of her own words almost impressed Katherine with their sincerity. She had seen the truth, and Peter’s futile efforts to withhold it from her had filled her with an almost kindly scorn for his stupidity. But in the light of his present relapse from fidelity, the retrospect grew lurid.
“Katherine,” said Odd gloomily, “I would not so have insulted you after this. As long as I kept my secret there would have been no insult.”
“I think I should have preferred the jilting before. You might have waited, Peter.”
Until now Katherine had steadily kept her eyes on Odd, and there had been growing in her a certain sense of loss, most illogical, most painful. Hilda had won, and she had never gained. Katherine hardly knew for jealousy the sudden desire for vengeance as she turned her eyes upon her sister.