His gesture brushed that aside. “I’m well now, thanks.” He looked her in the face and added: “May we have a few minutes’ talk?”
She faltered: “If you think it necessary.” Inwardly she had already begun to tremble. When his blue eyes turned to that harsh slate-gray, and the two perpendicular lines deepened between his brows, she had always trembled.
“You’ve made it necessary,” he retorted, his voice as harsh as his eyes.
“I?”
“You’ve broken our compact. It’s not my doing. I stuck to my side of it.” He flung out the short sentences like blows.
Her heart was beating so wildly that she could not follow what he said. “What do you mean?” she stammered.
“That you agreed to help me if I gave up Anne. God knows what your idea of helping me was. To me it meant only one thing: your keeping quiet, keeping out of the whole business, and trusting me to carry out my side of the bargain—as I did. I broke our engagement, chucked my job, went away. And you? Instead of keeping out of it, of saying nothing, you’ve talked against me, insinuated God knows what, and then refused to explain your insinuations. You’ve put me in such a position that I’ve got to take back my word to you, or appear to your daughter and your family as a man who has run away because he knew he couldn’t face the charge hanging over him.”
It was only in the white-heat of anger that he spoke with such violence, and at such length; he seemed spent, and desperately at bay, and the thought gave Kate Clephane courage.
“Well—can you face it?” she asked.
His expression changed, as she had so often seen it change. From menace it passed to petulance and then became almost pleading in its perplexity. She said to herself: “It’s the first time I’ve ever been brave with him, and he doesn’t know how to take it.” But even then she felt the precariousness of the advantage. His ready wit had so often served him instead of resolution. It served him now.