She broke off, her thin lips pressed together upon her secret.
There was a silence. Blindly Delia stared at the bold shepherd.
“Come back from where?” she asked at length in a low tone.
“Oh, what does it matter? You wouldn’t understand,” Charlotte broke off, in the very words her married cousin had compassionately addressed to her virginity.
A slow blush rose to Delia’s cheek: she felt oddly humiliated by the rebuke conveyed in that contemptuous retort. She seemed to herself shy, ineffectual, as incapable as an ignorant girl of dealing with the abominations that Charlotte was thrusting on her. But suddenly some fierce feminine intuition struggled and woke in her. She forced her eyes upon her cousin’s.
“You won’t tell me who it was?”
“What’s the use? I haven’t told anybody.”
“Then why have you come to me?”
Charlotte’s stony face broke up in weeping. “It’s for my baby ... my baby....”
Delia did not heed her. “How can I help you if I don’t know?” she insisted in a harsh dry voice: her heart-beats were so violent that they seemed to send up throttling hands to her throat.