"That means a mistake, a delusion?"
"It does."
"Then I don't think you do believe it. And, if you do, you are wrong. It is not all a—a mare's nest."
She pronounced the word with unfamiliar delicateness.
Tom knew that he did not believe that it was all a mare's nest. He would have given everything in the world—save one thing—and that, he thought, he had not got—to believe it.
"Then, if you believed it, why didn't you do something?" he asked rather fiercely.
"What have you all done? I, at least, warned him. Yes, since you insist, I hinted it. But you—you ran away; and your Adela Ferrars, she looks prim and pained, oh! and shocked, and doesn't come so much."
It was a queer source to learn lessons from, and Tom was no less surprised than Adela had been a day or two before at Dieppe.
"What should you do?" he asked, in new-born humility.
"I? Nothing. What is it to me?"