"Pshaw! that is mere playing with the subject. Do you mean to say you have given up even your honest opinion to her? You must know that it is not right for a wife to refuse to live with her husband. Come"—vehemently—"you must know that."
"Yes. Yes, of course," says poor Margaret, who doesn't know on earth what she is saying.
Her eyes are riveted on that awful screen, and now she is shaken to the very core by the fact that it is evidently undergoing a second earthquake! What is to be done? How long will this last? And when the end comes, will even one of them be left alive to tell the tale?
"Look here!" says Rylton. "She won't see me, it appears; she declines to acknowledge the tie that binds us. She has plainly decided on putting me outside her life altogether. But she can't do that, you know. And"—with some vehemence—"what I wish to say is this, that if I was in fault when I married her, fancying myself in love with another woman——"
"Maurice, I entreat," says Margaret, rising, "I desire you to——"
"No; you must listen. I will not be condemned unheard. She can't have it all her own way. If I was in fault, so was she. Is it right for a woman to marry a man without one spark of love for him, with—she never concealed it—an almost open dislike to him?"
"Dislike? Maurice——"
"Well, is she not proving it now? My coming seems to be the signal for her hiding herself away in her own room. 'In retirement' you said she was, with a bad headache. Do you think"—furiously—"I can't see through her headaches? Now listen, Margaret; the case stands thus: I married her for her money, and she married me for my title. We both accepted the risk, and——"
Margaret throws up her hands. Her face grows livid, her eyes are fastened on the screen, and at this moment it goes over with a loud crash.
"It is not true! It is a lie!" says Tita, advancing into the middle of the room, her lips apart, her eyes blazing.