"Have I ever said anything like that, Cora?"
"But you will, I dare say, when I have done. Well; what do you think my senior duenna did,—the female one, I mean? She took my own carriage, and posted off after Mr. Palliser as hard as ever she could, leaving the male duenna on the watch. I was dancing as hard as I could, but I knew what was going on all the time as well as though I had heard them talking. Of course Mr. Palliser came after me. I don't know what else he could do, unless, indeed, he had left me to my fate. He came there, and behaved so well,—so much like a perfect gentleman. Of course I went home, and I was prepared to tell him everything, if he spoke a word to me,—that I intended to leave him, and that cart-ropes should not hold me!"
"To leave him, Cora!"
"Yes, and go with that other man whose name you won't let me mention. I had a letter from him in my pocket asking me to go. He asked me a dozen times that night. I cannot think how it was that I did not consent."
"That you did not consent to your own ruin and disgrace?"
"That I did not consent to go off with him,—anywhere. Of course it would have been my own destruction. I'm not such a fool as not to know that. Do you suppose I have never thought of it;—what it would be to be a man's mistress instead of his wife. If I had not I should be a thing to be hated and despised. When once I had done it I should hate and despise myself. I should feel myself to be loathsome, and, as it were, a beast among women. But why did they not let me marry him, instead of driving me to this? And though I might have destroyed myself, I should have saved the man who is still my husband. Do you know, I told him all that,—told him that if I had gone away with Burgo Fitzgerald he would have another wife, and would have children, and would—?"
"You told your husband that you had thought of leaving him?"
"Yes; I told him everything. I told him that I dearly loved that poor fellow, for whom, as I believe, nobody else on earth cares a single straw."
"And what did he say?"
"I cannot tell you what he said, only that we are all to go to Baden together, and then to Italy. But he did not seem a bit angry; he very seldom is angry, unless at some trumpery thing, as when he threw the book away. And when I told him that he might have another wife and a child, he put his arm round me and whispered to me that he did not care so much about it as I had imagined. I felt more like loving him at that moment than I had ever done before."