“O! that.”
“There’s some purposed innuendo, I’m convinced, in the hussy’s mockery—perhaps to some former flame of my wife’s known to both. I believe, before God, it is that. You should have heard my lady before you came that night. On my soul, she had almost confessed bare-faced that she used this Kit to console herself for my neglect.”
“The devil she did!”
It was a new and surprising suggestion for Hamilton himself. It seemed to open out a wholly unexpected vista of mortifying possibilities. Could there be anything in it? Little signs—an odd look, a queer inflection of the voice, unsuspected of any significance at the time—occurred to him now in the connection of his cousin’s confidences. Was she really playing a double game with all of them, this little artless-seeming Thais? No! she was altogether too unsophisticated; he could not believe it. Besides, of course, he was actually forgetting that she and Mrs. Moll were but recent acquaintances. They could not have a knowledge of that name in common, unless——
“Did she specifically say ‘him’?” he asked Chesterfield.
“What do you mean?” demanded the Earl.
“You know Mrs. Davis would not admit Kit’s sex when I rallied her.”
Chesterfield shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
“Pooh! The merest subterfuge, to mislead and torment me. The dog’s a male dog; there’s no question whatever about it.”
Hamilton sat frowning a while. It was true that that fact of the women’s unacquaintance counted for little. Moll, the prying and mischievous, might easily have made a discovery; or, again, granted the alternative of Kate’s double-dealing, the two might be in a naughty confederacy to punish the master of the house. Truly, if it were no worse than that, he could forgive them, though their understanding meant a certain treachery to himself. But at least it would ease his mind of a qualm which had suddenly overtaken it.