“She said that I stood in your way.” The phrase sounded so grotesque as she uttered it that she found herself laughing again. She had not wished to speak these ugly things. Her heart was filled with noble words, with beautiful sentiments, but she could not make her lips pronounce them in spite of all the efforts she made. And she recalled suddenly the princess in the fairy tale who, when she opened her mouth, found that toads and lizards escaped from it instead of pearls and rubies.
At first he did not reply, and it seemed to her that only mechanical force could jerk his jaw back into place and close the eyelids over his vacant blue eyes. When at last he made a sound it was only the empty echo again, “stood in my way!”
“She is desperately in earnest.” Justice wrung this admission from her. “She feels that this subterfuge is unfair to us all. Your happiness, she thinks, is what we should consider first, and she is convinced that I should be sacrificed to your future. She was perfectly frank. She suppressed nothing.”
For the first time George Fleming uttered an original sound. “O Lord!” he exclaimed devoutly.
“I told her that I did not wish to stand in your way,” resumed Margaret, as if the exclamation had not interrupted the flow of her thoughts. “I told her I would give you up.”
Suddenly, without warning, he exploded. “What, in the name of heaven, has it got to do with you?” he demanded.
“To do with me?” It was her turn to echo. “But isn’t that girl—” she corrected herself painfully—“isn’t she living in your house at this minute?”
He cast about helplessly for an argument. When at last he discovered one, he advanced it with a sheepish air, as if he recognized its weakness. “Well, nobody else would take it, would they?”
“She says that you love her.”
He shifted his ground nervously. “I can’t help what she says, can I?”