Lady Smith-Evered threw up her fat hands. “My dear girl!—what on earth made you do such a foolhardy thing? You might have known the natives would talk. Of course I guessed you were in love with him, otherwise you would never have been so rude to me as you were that day when I asked you why he had left the Residency so suddenly. But I never dreamed that things had gone so far. Supposing you have a baby...?”
An expression of amazed indignation came into Muriel’s eyes, and for a few moments she was absolutely dumb. It was as though she had had a lump of mud flung straight at her face; and at first she experienced only burning resentment and blinding anger. Then, suddenly, she saw things as they were: the thought had never come to her until now in all its crudeness, its stark nakedness.
“How can you suggest such a thing?” she answered at last, lamely, her indignation strengthening her voice but not her wits.
“You must have been mad,” said Lady Smith-Evered. “And at your age, too! It was more than naughtiness: it was downright folly. And as for the man, he deserves to be thrashed.”
“But you don’t understand,” Muriel gasped. “There was no intimacy of any kind.”
Her visitor moved impatiently on her chair. “Oh, don’t tell me such fibs,” she exclaimed. “My dear Muriel, I am a woman of the world. I only want to help you.”
Her words only served to accentuate the girl’s alarm.
“But it’s true,” she cried. “I swear to you there was nothing of that kind between us.”
Lady Smith-Evered stared at her. “You can’t expect me or anybody else to believe that. Why, the man is a notorious bad character in regard to women.”
“No, he’s not,” she answered. “He may be a brute in other ways, but all this rot about his Bedouin harîm is just the silly talk of Cairo. I’m not going to beg you to believe me. I’m just telling you the truth; and if you don’t think it’s the truth you can go to ...”