“How kind of you to come,” she said.
“Kind of you to say so, since I come from the enemy’s camp. That reckless brother of mine!”
“Did he send you?” Hilda asked, fright in her eyes.
“Send me? Oh no, he didn’t send me; but after what he has told me, I came naturally of my own free will.” Hilda smiled faintly in reply to Mary’s smile.
“What has he told you?”
“Why, simply that he had been in love with you almost from the day he proposed to Katherine; indeed he implied an even remoter origin. Really Peter ought to be whipped! He almost deserves the sacking you are giving him!”
Hilda winced at the humorous tone.
“That he had made love to you most cruelly; that Katherine had come in upon the love scene; that she, too, was cruel—natural, though, wasn’t it? Peter is rather hard on Katherine. And, to sum up, that you had been badly treated by the world in general, by himself in particular, and that he was very desperate and you painfully perfect, and—oh, a great many things.”
“Did he tell you that I loved him?” Hilda asked, looking down at her sweet-peas with, if that were possible, an added pallor. She wondered if it was demanded of her that she should humiliate herself before Peter’s sister—tell her that she had made love to him.
“My dear child,” Mary’s voice dropped to a graver key, “Peter trusts me, you know, and he ought to trust me. He told me that when he made love to you, you and he together found out that fact.”