'If anyone had told me beforehand,' she resumed, 'that I should be so influenced by a man's—a man's acting, I would have laughed. But I was—I was. He succeeded completely.'
'You have not said what these extraordinary statements were,' Hugo insisted.
'Don't ask me,' she entreated, drying her eyes. 'It is enough that I was hoodwinked. If you have had no hand in this plot, don't ask me. I am too ashamed, too scornful of my credulity, to repeat them. You would laugh.'
'Should I?' said Hugo, smiling gravely. 'What occurred next?'
'The next step was that Mr. Tudor asked me to accompany his housekeeper to the housekeeper's room, and on the other side of the passage from the drawing-room I was to dine with him. The housekeeper is a Mrs. Dant, a kind, fat, lame old woman, and she produced this cloak and this hat, and so on, and said that they were for me! I was surprised, but I praised them and tried them on for a moment. You must remember that I was his affianced wife. I talked with Mrs. Dant, and prepared myself for dinner, and then I went back to the drawing-room, and found Mr. Tudor ready for dinner. I asked him why he had got the clothes, and he said he had got them this very morning merely on the chance of my accepting his proposal out of pity for him. And I believed that, too.'
There was a silence.
'But that is not the end?' Hugo encouraged her.
'Oh,' she exclaimed, 'it is useless, all this story! And the episode is finished! When I came in here I was angry; I suspect you of some complicity. But I suspect you no longer, and I see now that the wisest course for a woman such as I after such an adventure is to be mute about it, and to forget it.'
'No,' he said; 'you are wrong. Trust me. I entreat.'
Camilla bit her lip.