"If you persist in going on like this," says she, pressing her smelling-bottle to her nose, "I must ask you to go away—to go at once. I hate scenes. You must go!"
"I went away once," says Mrs. Bethune, standing pale and cold before her, "at your command—I went to the home of the man you selected for me. What devil's life I led with him you may guess at. You knew him, I did not. I was seventeen then." She pauses; the breath she draws seems to rive her body in twain. "I came back——" she says presently.
"A widow?"
"A widow—thank God!"
A silence follows; something of tragedy seems to have fallen into the air—with that young lovely creature standing there, upright, passionate, her arms clasped behind her head, as the heroine of it. The sunlight from the dying day lights up the red, rich beauty of her hair, the deadly pallor of her skin. Through it all the sound of the tennis-balls from below, as they hurry to and fro through the hair, can be heard. Perhaps it reaches her. She flings herself suddenly into a chair, and bursts out laughing.
"Let us come back to common-sense," cries she. "What were we talking of? The marriage of Maurice to this little plebeian—this little female Croesus. Well, what of the argument—what?"
Her manner is a little excited.
"I, for one, object to the marriage," says Margaret distinctly. "The child is too young and too rich! She should be given a chance; she should not be coerced and drawn into a mesh, as it were, without her knowledge."
"A mesh? Do you call a marriage with my son a mesh?" asks Lady Rylton angrily. "He of one of the oldest families in England, and she a nobody!"
"There is no such thing as a nobody," says Miss Knollys calmly. "This girl has intellect, mind, a soul! She has even money! She must be considered."