Victoria laughed again. “Oh, Kilboggan told me all about you two—in Paris and down at Monte Carlo. He hears everything. I forgot it until you spoke her name. ‘Pasts’ don’t interest me.”
Marlowe flushed angrily and his voice was tense with convincing indignation as he said, “I beg you, Victoria, not to put Miss Bromfield in this false light. No one but a—a Kilboggan would have concocted and spread such a story about such a woman.”
His tone forbade further discussion, and there was a brief, embarrassed silence. Then Marguerite went rattling on again. Stilson came back to the table and lit a cigarette with elaborate and deliberate care. Marlowe continued to stare to the front, his face expressionless, but his eyes taking in Stilson’s expression without seeming to do so. They were talking again presently, but each was constrained toward the other. Marlowe knew that Stilson was suspecting him, but, beyond being flattered by the tribute to his former “gallantry,” he did not especially care—had he not said all that he honourably could say? Emily, not he, had insisted upon secrecy.
As for Stilson, his brain seemed to be submerged in a plunge of boiling blood. Circumstances of Marlowe’s and Emily’s relations rose swiftly one upon another, all linking into proof. “How can I have been so blind?” he thought.
The Marlowes did not linger after supper. Marguerite went to bed and Stilson shut himself in his own suite. He unlocked and opened a drawer in the table in his study. He drew from under several bundles of papers the sketch of Emily which the Democrat had reproduced with her despatch from the Furnaceville strike. He looked contempt and hate at the dreamy, strong yet sweet, young face. “So you are Marlowe’s cast-off?” he said with a sneer. “And I was absurd enough—to believe in you—in any one.”
He flung the picture into the fire. Then he sat in the big chair, his form gradually collapsing and his face taking on that expression of misery which seemed natural to its deep lines and strong features.
“And when Mary grows up,” he said aloud, “no doubt she too—” But he did not clearly finish the thought. He shrank ashamed from the stain with which he in his unreasoning anguish had smirched that white innocence.
After a while he reached into the fireplace and took from the dead coals in the corner the cinder of the picture. Very carefully he drew it out and dropped it into an envelope. That he sealed and put away in the drawer.
CHAPTER XXX.
TWO AND A TRIUMPH.
BUT Stilson’s image of her was no longer clear and fine; and in certain lights, or, rather, shadows, it seemed to have a sinister unloveliness. He assured himself that he felt toward her as before. But—he respected her with a reservation; he loved her with a doubt; he believed in her—did he believe in her at all? He was continually regilding his idol, which persistently refused to retain the gilt.