“But what makes you suspect him now?”
“Suspect? I suspect nothing!”
The girl stood looking at her fixedly under dark menacing brows. “I do, then! I wouldn’t allow myself to before; but all the while I knew there was another woman.” Between the sentences she drew short panting breaths, as though with every word speech grew more difficult. “Mother,” she broke out, “the day I went to Baltimore to see him the maid who opened the door didn’t want to let me in because there’d been a woman there two days before who’d made a scene. A scene—that’s what she said! Isn’t it horrible?” She burst into tears.
Kate Clephane sat stupefied. She could not yet grasp the significance of the words her daughter was pouring out, and repeated dully: “You went to Baltimore?” How secret Anne must be, she thought, not only to have concealed her visit at the time, but even to have refrained from any allusion to it during their stormy talk at Rio! How secret, since, even in moments of seeming self-abandonment, she could refrain from revealing whatever she chose to keep to herself! More acutely than ever, the mother had the sense of being at arm’s length from her child.
“Yes, I went to Baltimore,” said Anne, speaking now in a controlled incisive voice. “I didn’t tell you at the time because you were not well. It was just after you came back from Meridia, and had that nervous break-down—you remember? I didn’t want to bother you about my own affairs. But as soon as I got his letter saying the engagement was off I jumped into the first train, and went straight to Baltimore to see him.”
“And you did?” It slipped from Kate irresistibly.
“No. He was away; he’d left. But I didn’t believe it at the time; I thought the maid-servant had had orders not to let me in....” She paused. “Mother, it was too horrible; she took me for the woman who had made the scene. She said I looked just like her.”
Kate gasped: “The negress said so?”
Her question seemed to drop into the silence like a shout; it was as if she had let fall a platter of brass on a marble floor.
“The negress?” Anne echoed.