Dredlinton stood and glared at his wife, his eyes narrowing, his mean little mouth curled.
"Josephine," he cried, "I don't care a damn about your leaving my house, then or at any time, but the more I think of it, the stranger it seems to me that this friend of yours, Wingate, should come to the office and threaten me for my connection with the B. & I., and at the moment of leaving offer to sell wheat. I am getting a little suspicious about your friend, my lady. I have given them the tip at Scotland Yard and I only hope they take advantage of it."
"Why single out Mr. Wingate?" she asked, "He certainly is not alone in his antipathy to your company."
"Don't I know that?" Dredlinton exclaimed angrily. "Don't I get a dozen threatening letters a day? Men take me on one side and reason with me in the club. I had a Cabinet Minister at the office this afternoon. I begin to get the cold shoulder wherever I turn, but, damn it all, don't you understand that we must have money?"
Josephine regarded him with a cold lack of sympathy in her face.
"I understand that you have had about a hundred thousand pounds of mine," she remarked.
"Like your generosity, my dear, to remind me of it," he sneered. "To you it seems, I suppose, a great deal of money. To me—well, I am not sure that it was fair compensation for what I have never had."
"What you have never had, you never deserved, Henry."
He flung himself towards the door.
"Josephine," he said, looking back, "do you know you are one of the few women in the world I can't even talk to? You freeze me up every time I try. I wonder whether the man who is so anxious to stand in my shoes—"