"Mark, forgive me. You don't resent my speaking about it all? You know I do it only because I'm so dreadfully sorry, and couldn't bear that there should be anything further...."
"You are everything that is kind," said Mark steadily, "and you and Sir Julian are the best friends I have in the world."
Edna could have dispensed with the inclusion of her husband's name.
It served, in fact, to stem her tide of warning, the more especially as she felt more or less convinced that Mark was not making the intended application of her words.
She gave smilingly graceful congratulations to the newly-betrothed Iris, the more strongly tinged with motherliness from her consciousness of recent success with Ruthie, and even endured a prolonged wringing of her hand from Mr. Garrett, who had followed his new lodestar to Culmhayes.
But that evening, after a silence more fraught with thoughtfulness even than usual, and in consequence even more studiously ignored than usual by Sir Julian, she said to him abruptly:
"Have you any idea whether Clarence Isbister's jilt knows the true facts of the case about Mark?"
Few things could be more designedly insulting than Lady Rossiter's practice of invariably alluding to Miss Marchrose in her capacity of a wrecker of hearts. Julian, however, replied imperturbably:
"Do you mean the dipsomaniac?"
Lady Rossiter liked the term no better than her husband liked that of "jilt," as applied to Miss Marchrose, and as she would not be guilty of making use of it, she merely inclined her head gravely.