‘I would rather you hated than tolerated me,’ cried Dinah, her tear-worn eyes looking bravely up into Arbuthnot’s face.
Some new note in her voice startled him. It was a note, Gaston Arbuthnot felt, that might well prove the prelude to dangerous self-assertion. Was a tu quoque possible?
‘You do not wish me to be tolerant. The husband of any excessively pretty woman must be so, whether he will or not. Now yesterday—suppose the medal reversed, Dinah, that I begin to cross-question you—how did you spend your afternoon, yesterday? You forget. Let me refresh your memory. With whom were you walking down the High Street, towards four o’clock, in the dove-coloured dress I invented for you, the Gainsborough hat, the cambric collar?’
‘I am not jesting, though you are.’ Dinah started to her feet, her eyes were level with her husband’s. ‘Geoffrey came in after you had gone away; I was idle and dull as usual, and Geff asked me to carry some fruit and flowers to the hospital. The walk did me good. We visited a Devonshire sailor-lad—like one of my own people, he seemed to me—and I was able to talk with him, the old country talk I love so well. And afterwards, coming back—perhaps with my heart a little lightened—I met ... your friend.’
‘Poor, ill-fated Linda Thorne?’
‘And everything went dark again. It was then I heard about your bet, how you had won, how Mrs. Thorne was bankrupt! Mrs. Thorne had made her way into the parlour while I was out. Your winnings were left for you by her own hand. Gaston, I found them!’
‘The situation, my dear girl, grows poignant. You found them!’
Gaston Arbuthnot checked himself. The dimensions of this domestic tragedy—this storm of wifely passion over a pair of iron-gray gloves—overcame him with a fatal sense of the ridiculous.
Dinah saw that he repressed a smile. Her righteous anger waxed hotter.
‘And I intend to keep them until I die. If ... I mean when you see Mrs. Thorne, you can tell her so.’