"Oh, no, no! I advise nothing," says Marian, with a little wave of her arms.
"But why?" demands Lady Rylton angrily.
She had depended upon Marian to support her against Margaret.
"Simply because I won't," says Mrs. Bethune, her strange eyes beginning to blaze.
"Because you daren't?" questions Lady Rylton, with a sneer.
"I don't understand you," says Marian coldly.
"Don't you?" Lady Rylton's soft, little, fair face grows diabolical. "Then let me explain." Margaret makes a movement towards her, but she waves her back. "Pray let me explain, Margaret. Our dear Marian is so intensely dull that she wants a word in season. We all know why she objects to a marriage of any sort. She made a fiasco of her own first marriage, and now hopes——"
She would have continued her cruel speech but that Mrs. Bethune, who has risen, breaks into it. She comes forward in a wild, tempestuous fashion, her eyes afire, her nostrils dilated! Her beautiful red hair seems alight as she descends upon Lady Rylton.
"And that marriage!" says she, in a suffocating tone. "Who made it? Who?" She looks like a fury. There is hatred, an almost murderous hatred, in the glance she casts at the little, languid, pretty woman before her, who looks back at her with uplifted shoulders, and an all-round air of surprise and disapprobation. "You to taunt me!" says she, in a low, condensed tone. "You, who hurried, who forced me into a marriage with a man I detested! You, who gave me to understand, when I resisted, that I had no place on this big earth except a pauper's place—a place in a workhouse!"
She stands tall, grave, magnificent, in her fury before Lady Rylton, who, in spite of the courage born of want of feeling, now shrinks from her as if affrighted.