"I can't. I tried to. The trouble is that it was YOU—something you did,
I mean. Something he found out about you—"
Undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her chair. "About me? How fearfully false! Why, I've never even LOOKED at anybody—!"
"It's nothing of that kind." Indiana's mournful head-shake seemed to deplore, in Undine, an unsuspected moral obtuseness. "It's the way you acted to your own husband."
"I—my—to Ralph? HE reproaches me for that? Peter Van Degen does?" "Well, for one particular thing. He says that the very day you went off with him last year you got a cable from New York telling you to come back at once to Mr. Marvell, who was desperately ill."
"How on earth did he know?" The cry escaped Undine before she could repress it.
"It's true, then?" Indiana exclaimed. "Oh, Undine—"
Undine sat speechless and motionless, the anger frozen to terror on her lips.
Mrs. Rolliver turned on her the reproachful gaze of the deceived benefactress. "I didn't believe it when he told me; I'd never have thought it of you. Before you'd even applied for your divorce!"
Undine made no attempt to deny the charge or to defend herself. For a moment she was lost in the pursuit of an unseizable clue—the explanation of this monstrous last perversity of fate. Suddenly she rose to her feet with a set face.
"The Marvells must have told him—the beasts!" It relieved her to be able to cry it out.