“No!” Fanny gasped.
“You did!”
“I tell you I didn’t know how much talk there was, and it wouldn’t have amounted to much if Wilbur had lived.” And Fanny completed this with a fatal admission: “I didn’t want you to interfere.”
George overlooked the admission; his mind was not now occupied with analysis. “What do you mean,” he asked, “when you say that if father had lived, the talk wouldn’t have amounted to anything?”
“Things might have been—they might have been different.”
“You mean Morgan might have married you?”
Fanny gulped. “No. Because I don’t know that I’d have accepted him.” She had ceased to weep, and now she sat up stiffly. “I certainly didn’t care enough about him to marry him; I wouldn’t have let myself care that much until he showed that he wished to marry me. I’m not that sort of person!” The poor lady paid her vanity this piteous little tribute. “What I mean is, if Wilbur hadn’t died, people wouldn’t have had it proved before their very eyes that what they’d been talking about was true!”
“You say—you say that people believe—” George shuddered, then forced himself to continue, in a sick voice: “They believe my mother is—is in love with that man?”
“Of course!”
“And because he comes here—and they see her with him driving—and all that—they think they were right when they said she was in—in love with him before—before my father died?”