"Yes, yes," gasped Margaret, as if she were choking, "he is your husband—he is nothing to me. I have no right to stay here now. I will go."
"Perhaps you'd like to see him again, like to see us face to face and have it out with him?" suggested Lottie, doubtfully, and watching Margaret's face covertly.
"No, no," she said, instantly, and with a shudder, "I—I never wish to see him again."
"He has behaved cruelly, shamefully to you, miss," said Lottie; "to both of us, in fact, and he isn't worth fretting about, though he is a lord."
Margaret sat staring at the gayly patterned carpet, almost as if she had not heard the last words, then she looked round the room in a kind of bewildered fashion.
Lottie rose and let down her veil.
"There is a train in an hour," she said, with a sympathetic sigh, "if you'd like to go to London, or perhaps you'd like to go abroad. If there should be money wanted——"
She had almost gone too far.
Margaret rose and looked at her with wild eyes.
"I will go," she panted, "do not be afraid. I will never see your—your husband again. But leave me alone! Do not offer me money"—then her face changed, and with a sob she cried—"forgive me. It is you who have been wronged as well as me. I—I did not mean to speak so—but, ah, if you would only go and leave me to fight against my misery."