‘Oh, no, no!’ She pauses. ‘Surely you know.’ At this moment something in the girl’s air makes Wyndham feel that she is believing him guilty of a desire to play the hypocrite—to conceal something. ‘It cannot have gone so very far,’ says she miserably. ‘A few words from you to her——’
‘To “her” again? If not my aunt,’ demands he frantically, ‘what her?’
She looks at him with sad astonishment.
‘I see now you wouldn’t trust me,’ says she. Her eyes are suffused with tears. She turns aside, her hands tightly clenched, as if in pain. Then all at once she breaks out. ‘Oh,’ cries she passionately, ‘why didn’t you tell her at first?’ Tell her at first! Who the deuce is ‘her’? ‘Or even me. If’—miserably—‘if I had known, I should not have come here, and then there would have been no trouble, no wondering, no mystery; and there would have been no misunderstanding between you and’—she draws a sharp breath—‘the girl you love!’
‘Good heavens! Do I find myself in Bedlam?’ cries Wyndham, who is not by any means an even-tempered man, and who now has lost the last rag of self-control. ‘What girl do I love?’
But his burst of rage seems to take small effect on Ella.
‘Of course,’ says she, in a stifled tone, directing her attention now to a bush near her, plucking hurriedly at its leaves, ‘if you wish to keep it a secret—and you know I said you didn’t trust me—and, of course, if you wish to’—her voice here sounds broken—‘to tell me nothing, you are right—quite right. There is no reason why I should be let into your confidence.’
‘Look here,’ says Wyndham roughly. He catches her arm and compels her to turn round. ‘Let’s get to the bottom of this matter. What did my aunt tell you? Come now! Out with it straight and plain.’
He has occasionally entreated his clients to be honest, but usually with very poor results. Now, however, he finds one to answer him even more straightly than he had at all bargained for. Ella flings up her head. Perhaps she had objected to that magisterial ‘Come now.’
‘She said you were in love with her daughter, and that you had meant to marry her, until—my being here interfered with it. She’—the girl pauses, and regards him anxiously, as if looking to him for an explanation—‘didn’t say how I interfered.’