“Stop playing the self-sacrificing little angel with me!” She turned on Elinor fiercely. “I know perfectly well how you hate me, and you know how I feel about you. I’m sick and tired of keeping up this pretense any longer!”
“But—my dear.” Hugh was even whiter than Elinor. “I—I thought that you loved Elinor devotedly, and that you two would be just like sisters. You’re—you’re nervous and upset to-night. You don’t know what you’re saying——”
“Please! Don’t make excuses for me, Hugh,” Geraldine interrupted savagely. “I don’t love her! I never have loved her, and I never will love her! And you might as well know it right now!”
“You gave me to understand one night in New York that you had only Elinor’s interest at heart—when you persuaded me to do—something—I didn’t think was quite fair. Do you remember it, Geraldine?” Hugh set his lips in their old grim line, as memory flashed back the picture.
Geraldine tossed aside her necklace. A look of pure contempt, all but hatred, distorted her features as she looked at her husband slowly. Then her lip curled and she laughed.
“For a clever and brilliant business man, you’re the biggest fool I’ve ever met in all my life!” she flung at him. She rushed into her own room and banged the door after her.
For a moment Hugh stood and stared at the closed door, too astonished to move. When the realization of the miserable scene he had just passed through, finally dawned upon his numbed consciousness, he sank heavily down upon the nearest chair and groaned aloud.
Elinor was on her knees beside him instantly. “Oh, Daddy,” she murmured soothingly, “Daddy—dear.”
He buried his head in his hands. “Oh—my God!” His body shook convulsively. “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”
The sound of his daughter’s heart-broken sobs roused him from his own misery. Her head was buried on his knee, her whole figure a picture of abject misery. He bent over and touched her tumbled hair, idly tried to arrange the torn lace of her bodice.