"And I did not kill him!" she muttered aloud, as if in apology to the rifle.
Jacqueline, who had been watching her fearfully, ran with a little cry and clung to her close.
"Mummy, don't look like that, don't stare so queerly! You frighten me," she wailed. "Didn't you guess—didn't you understand, when I told you how I adored him? I—I thought you would. How could I help it? I didn't know—I—Oh, Mummy!"
Kate with a gesture brushed aside her incoherences, brushed aside the thing she was confessing—a thing she saw to have been inevitable, taking into account the girl's nature, her inheritance ("From both sides," the mother reminded herself, grimly), and the man she had had to deal with. Kate told herself she was a fool not to have suspected it from the first; or rather to have allowed Channing to dull her suspicion of it with his halting statement that he was, after all, "a gentleman."
Even in that moment of sickening surprise, she faced and accepted and took upon herself the burden of her child's weakness. It was not that sin which roused in her a rapidly mounting tide of furious anger against Jacqueline. It was her sin against Philip Benoix.
"You accused me of deceit, of a lie. You!" Her voice was curiously thick, and she spoke with great effort. "Ah! There have been bad women in this family of yours, my girl, but never before, I think, a dishonorable one."
Jacqueline recoiled from her.
"Dishonorable! And my daughter! Stealing a good man's name to cover her own shame. How dared you, how dared you?" She began to stride up and down the room, the words pouring from her lips at white heat. Kate Kildare was one of the people whose quiet serenity covers a great power of anger, all the more forceful for being kept within bounds. Rarely indeed had she allowed it to force the flood-gates; and Jacqueline cowered away from her, staring, hardly believing it was herself to whom this cold fury of speech was addressed.
"Philip, left to my care by his father, Philip for whom I wanted everything good in life even more than for my own children! Oh, how dared you? So devoted to us, so grateful to me—how could he refuse? What chance had he? Even if he had known—" She turned on Jacqueline with a sudden gleam of hope. "Did he know? Were you honest enough to tell him?"
The girl gasped. "How could I?" The blood came up over her face in a painful flood and her head drooped. "But—but I think he—understood. He—seemed to."