Melville noted her heightened colour and drew confidence from it.
"After you left him, Lavender—that morning—all those years ago——"
"Yes?" she said, as Melville seemed to hesitate.
"Well, how do you suppose he took it?"
"I can't possibly tell," she replied impatiently, and Melville drove his advantage further home; he would work upon her imagination as much as he could.
"I can picture him so clearly," Melville said meditatively. "At first he was angry—frightfully angry, and only thought of how he would punish you when you came back. Then, as you stayed away, he began—more to save his own honour than for any other reason—to invent explanations of your absence, but all the time he was raging at having been made a fool of by the child whom he had honoured by marrying. Then he began to search for you, at first with the idea of saving you from going to the devil, but afterwards with the different idea that he might be able to divorce you and put an end to the whole miserable business. But years went by and you never came back, and the little nine days' wonder was forgotten and he inherited the title, and now he not only hopes but believes that you are dead. And if you crop up again you'll hurt him in his pride ten thousand times more than you did when you left him, because then he was nobody in particular, and now he's a baronet and the best part of a millionaire, with a big position and heaps of friends, all of whom suppose him to be unmarried. You will be his dead past rising up like a ghost and ruining him, and he will never forgive you. Sir Geoffrey never does forgive. No, Lavender, you will have to pay for what you've done; pay to the uttermost farthing!"
There was silence for some moments, and then the tension was broken by the valet bringing in the tea-things, which he placed by Mrs. Sinclair. Melville rose and heaped some strawberries on a plate, flanking them with wafer-biscuits.
"It's a nice little world as it is," he said, as if carrying on some trivial conversation begun before the servant came into the room. "People ought always to enjoy things as they are. That's not only good philosophy, but a much easier one to put into practice than is commonly supposed."
He drank the tea that Mrs. Sinclair gave him, and waited until the valet noiselessly disappeared.
"Well?" he said interrogatively.