“It was hardly worth my daughter’s while to come here for half a minute,” she remarked, “or mine either.”
Evelyn turned to her; he was conscious of even a sort of pity for her.
“It was not worth your while,” he said, “because your presence here makes no difference. When I said your daughter might have trusted me and come here alone, I did not know what I know now. I love her. Madge, do you hear?”
She gave one long sigh, and the scarlet cloak fell to the ground. But she did not move.
“Oh! Evelyn,” she said.
Lady Ellington rustled in her chair, as she might have rustled at a situation in a play that interested her. She knew what had happened, but she had not yet fully realised it. But her cool, quick brain very soon grasped it all, and began forging ahead again. There were a hundred obstacles she could yet throw in the way of this calm, advancing force.
“And which of you proposes to tell Philip?” she said.
The effect of this was admirable from her point of view. It brought both of the others back to earth again. Evelyn winced as if he had been struck, and Madge came quickly off the platform.
“Philip?” she cried. “Ah, what have we done? What have we said? Philip must never know. We must never tell him. Ah, but next week!”
The one thought that for this last ten minutes had possessed her, had possessed her to the exclusion of everything else. There had been no Philip, no world, no anything except the one inevitable fact. But Lady Ellington’s well-timed and perfectly justifiable observation made everything else, all the sorrows and the bitternesses that must come, reel into sight again. But she turned not to her mother, but to Evelyn.