"But that was swindling."
"For the matter of that it's all swindling as far as I can see. One strives to get the money out of another man's pocket by some juggling arrangement. For myself I cannot understand how a gentleman can condescend to wish to gain another man's money. But I leave that all alone. It is so; and when I meet a man who is on the turf as they call it, I keep my own feelings to myself. He has his own laws of conduct and I have mine. But here is a man who does not obey his own laws; and puts money in his pocket by breaking them. He can do as he pleases. It is nothing to me. But he ought not to come and call upon my wife." In this way he talked himself into a passion; but the passion was now against Sir Francis Geraldine and not against his wife.
On the next morning Miss Altifiorla was despatched by an early train so that she might be able to get down to Exeter, viâ London, early in the day. It behoved her to go to London on the route. She had things to buy and people to see, and to London she went. "Good-bye, my dear," she said, seeming to include the husband as well as the wife in the address. "I have spent a most pleasant fortnight, and have been most delighted to become acquainted with your husband. You are Cecilia Holt no longer. But it would have been sad indeed not to know him who has made you Cecilia Western." Then she put out her hand, and getting hold of that of the gentleman squeezed it with the warmest affection. But her farewell address made to Mrs. Western in her own room was quite different in its tone. "Now I am going, Cecilia," she said, "and am leaving you in the midst of terrible dangers."
"I hope not," said Cecilia.
"But I am. They would have been over now and passed if you would have allowed me to obey my reason, and to tell him the whole story of your former love."
"Why you?"
"Because I am your most intimate friend. And I think I should have told it in such a manner as to disarm his wrath."
"It is out of the question. I will tell him."
"Do so. Do so. But I doubt your courage. Do so this very morning. And remember that at any rate Francesca Altifiorla has been true to her promise."
That such a promise should have been needed and should have been boasted of with such violent vulgarity was almost more than Mrs. Western could stand. She came down-stairs and then underwent the additional purgatory of listening to the silver-tongued farewell. That she, she with her high ideas of a woman's duty and a woman's dignity, should have put herself into such a condition was a marvel to herself. Had some one a year since told her that she should become thus afraid of a fellow-creature and of one that she loved best in all the world, she would have repelled him who had told her with disdain. But so it was. How was she to tell her husband that she had been engaged to one whom he had described to her as a gambler and a swindler?