“I hardly know. I think I said that one or other of us must leave the room.”
“Very proper; and he?”
“He—he asked me whether I hated him for it. And I told him I did not.”
Then she broke; whether or no it was wiser to be silent she did not pause to consider, for she could not be silent. There must be a crash; a situation of this kind could not adjust itself in passivity, it was mere temporising not to speak at once.
“Because I don’t hate him,” she said, now speaking quickly as if in fear of interruption. “I love him. Oh! I have done my best; if he had never spoken, never let me know that he loved me, I could have gone on, I think, and done what it has been arranged for me to do. Philip knew, you see, that I did not love him like that. I had told him. But I did not know what it was. I almost wish I had never known. But I know; I can’t help that now.”
Whatever Lady Ellington’s gospel as regards the best plan on which to conduct life was worth, if weighed as a moral principle, it is quite certain that she acted up to it. She put a paper-knife into the book she had taken up during Madge’s aimless wanderings about the room to mark the page of her perusal, and spoke with perfect calmness.
“And what do you propose to do?” she asked.
Madge had not up till that moment proposed to do anything; she had not, in other words, considered the practical interpretation of this bewildering discovery. The fact that her silent, secret love—a love which she was determined to lock up forever in her own breast—was returned, was so emotionally overwhelming that as from some blinding light she could only turn a dazzled eye elsewhere. Her first instinct, at the moment at which that was declared to her, was of rapturous acceptance of it, but almost as instinctive (not quite so instinctive, since it had come second) was a shrinking from all that it implied—her rupture with Philip, his inevitable suffering, the pressure that she knew would be brought to bear on her. Yet the thing had to be faced; it was no use shrinking from it, and Lady Ellington’s question reminded her of the obvious necessity for choice. Her choice indeed was made; it was time to think of what action that choice implied. But she answered quietly enough.
“No, I have not yet thought of what I mean to do,” she said. “I suppose we had better talk about it.”
Then Lady Ellington unmasked all her batteries. It was quite clear that Madge already seriously contemplated breaking off her engagement with Philip and marrying this artist.