“Ah. I knew that, Miss Trant. Following on that, I find you travelling back to London the very same evening with that—that friend of yours, Mr. Vandeleur. Rather a coincidence.”
“You mean,” I said, my heart thumping with rage, partly against Cicely’s adorer for making this trouble, partly against this other man with his savage tone and suspicious eyes, “that you think I told him to send the wire!”
“There was the wire! And there he was.”
“Even if it had been so, why not?”
“With you engaged to me?”
“Nominally!”
“Makes no difference to the circumstances!” he shot out. “Who knows that, but you and I? To anyone else, it would have looked uncommonly——”
“I don’t see it!” I declared, but I saw the reason of his anger and it made me angrier still. His dignity compromised! His official dignity as a fiancé! So I had heard of married men, with wives to whom they were utterly indifferent, still showing that furious male jealousy of other men. “But I should have been doing nothing against our contract.”
“Nothing against the letter of it, you think? But when I asked you to enter into it, one of my first questions, you’ll remember, was whether you were already engaged.”
“Well?”