‘You don’t deny it?’ said the girl, speaking with the same tense quiet as before.
‘No, no,’ said Paul, ‘I don’t deny it What brought her here?’
‘She came to assert her rights,’ said Phyllis, with a biting indignation. ‘She came to warn us that she was setting the law in motion, and that she would drag Madge’s name—you hear? Madge’s name—through the mud of the Divorce Court; and only this morning I loved you, and respected you, and believed in you.’
‘I must see Madge,’ said Paul.
‘You shall not!’ she cried, flashing to the door, and setting her back against it.
But the door was opened from without, and Madge was here. Paul opened his arms to her, and she laid her pale face against his breast.
‘I have feared it always,’ she said, ‘and it has come at last. My poor, poor Paul ‘how you must have suffered!’
‘Your poor, poor Paul,’ said Phyllis, in a voice of bitterest disdain, ‘is a very fitting object for your pity. My personal recommendation is that your poor Paul should drown himself.’
‘You don’t understand, dear,’ Madge answered her—’ you don’t understand. Paul has done me no wrong. We did not take you into our confidence, because you were too young; but there has been no disguise among the rest of us. I knew of this before Paul and I resolved to spend our lives together. Mother knew it; George knew it; you know it now, dear. Will it part us, Bill?’
The girl’s face changed from angry scorn to pure bewilderment, and then again to pity.