"It is a pretty fire, isn't it, Maurice?"
Then her whole expression changed. Into her dark, dewy eyes came a look of rage, visible murder in a glance.
"You called me a liar, there in Boston," she said hissingly. "I am not surprised to have you add thief now. I have only done what I chose with my own property; but I would have been cut into little bits before you should have had that will through me!"
He could not trust himself to reply. He felt that if he spoke he might break out into curses, and he was conscious of an unmanly longing to strike her, to mar that beautiful, false face, childlike and pure in every line,—for the expression of rage had melted as quickly as it had come,—to feel the joy of seeing her limbs slacken and her red lips grow white. He clinched his hands and turned resolutely away.
"I'm sure I don't know that there was anything there that you had any interest in," she pursued lightly. "I tried as long as I dared to get the bottom open, and I couldn't, so I decided that it wasn't any of my business. Only when I put the poker through there seemed to be papers there."
Maurice could endure no more. He started toward her so fiercely that she recoiled, a sudden pallor blanching her rosy loveliness. Then he turned abruptly away again, and got out of the house.
XXXII
NOW HE IS FOR THE NUMBERS
Romeo and Juliet, ii. 4.
Interest in the question who would be bishop increased as Lent waned and the time for the meeting of the convention approached. The general public could not be expected to be greatly concerned about a matter so purely ecclesiastical, but the wide popularity of Mr. Strathmore gave to the election a character of its own. The question was generally held to be that of the prevalence of liberal views. Many who cared nothing about the church were interested in seeing whether new or old ideas would prevail. The age is one in which there is a keen curiosity to see what course the church will take. It is partly due, undoubtedly, to the inherited habit of being concerned in theology; it is perhaps more largely the result of unconscious desire for a liberalism so great that it shall justify those who have been so liberal as to lay aside all religion whatever.
The papers had entered into the discussion with an alacrity quickened by the fact that at this especial season there was not much else in the way of news. Rangely wrote for the "Daily Eagle" a glowing editorial in which he urged the choice of Strathmore on the ground that the new bishop should be not the representative of a faction, but of the whole church, and as far as possible of the people. It insisted that only a man liberal himself could have breadth to understand and sympathize with all shades of feeling. Others of the secular press had taken up the discussion, and Mrs. Wilson declared that the devil was contributing editorials to the papers in his keen fear that Father Frontford would be elected.