IN WHICH DEATH IS A RELIEF
After Stanley had left them, Isabelle Kingsland and Isabelle Fitzgerald sat silent for a while, looking into each other's faces, the brain of each throbbing with a tumult of agitating thoughts. The Englishwoman voicing to herself a subtle suggestion of coming evil, which had been omnipresent since her marriage day, an instinctive presentiment that all was not well: the Irish girl feeling strongly irritated at this last of the many annoying contretemps of the week; and smarting under a sense of injustice that, when she had merely practised a little harmless deception for a friend's sake, that friend should leave the field and the eminently disagreeable explanations to her.
She vented her feelings by a shrug of the shoulders, which broke the tension of the silence.
"Tell me—on your honour, tell me," cried Lady Isabelle, "that he did not speak the truth; that I am married to Lieutenant Kingsland!"
"Of course you're married to Lieutenant Kingsland," replied Miss Fitzgerald, with a little sigh of resignation. "You read your licence, didn't you?"
"Yes. But——"
"But that's quite sufficient—and there's no occasion for a scene."
"It's not sufficient, not nearly sufficient—there's something that's being kept back from me, and I want to know the truth!" and Lady Isabelle rose, becoming quite queenly in her indignant agitation.
"I've been uneasy from the first about my marriage," she continued, "because it was not open as I should have wished. I knew there was some mystery about it. My husband admitted as much to me from the first, and he did not need to tell me that you were the prime mover in the affair. It is my right to know the truth."
"The assertion of people's rights is responsible for most of the wrong done in the world. Did your husband counsel you to insult his best friend?"