“Very well, Hilary. Play your hand by all means. Throw your best card, but I can trump it. I have a better hand than you. I hold all the honours, and you shan’t even take the odd trick.”
“Explain,” he said shortly, with, however, more than an inkling as to her meaning.
“Well, I will then. You give me away. I give you away. See?”
“Oh, perfectly. But it’ll make no difference. You can’t injure me, and I wouldn’t for the world injure you—but—I won’t allow this scandalous affair to go any further, no, not at any cost!”
“I can’t injure you, can’t I?” she said, dropping out her words slowly, a sneer of deadly malice spreading over her face. “No? What will the Bayfields say when they hear what you and I have been to each other?”
With infinite self-control, he commanded his features, trusting they did not betray any inkling of the direful sinking of heart with which he grasped the import of her words. He was not altogether taken by surprise, for he had taken such a possibility into account—as a possibility, not a probability.
“That can’t be helped. At any cost I told you I should prevent this. At any cost mind, and at a far greater loss to myself than even that would be. And—I will.”
“Ha-ha-ha!” and the jeering laughter, shrill in its hate and vengeful malevolence, rang out clear on the sweet morning air. “Ha-ha-ha! But I don’t think you’ve altogether counted the cost, my Hilary. How about Lyn—your sweet, pure, innocent Lyn? What will she say when she knows? What will her father say when they both know—that you have allowed her to be under the same roof with—to grasp in ordinary social friendship the hand of your—for years—most devoted and affectionate... housekeeper?”
Well was it for the speaker, well for both of them, that the words were uttered here, and not in the far-away scene of the life to which she referred. For a second, just one brief second, the man’s eyes flashed the murder in his soul. With marvellous self-restraint, but with dry lips and face a shade pale, he answered:
“That would be a regrettable thing to happen. But, it doesn’t shake my determination. I don’t see, either, how the outraging of other people’s finer feelings is going to benefit you, or, to any appreciable extent, injure me.”