“No heroics, if you please, child. I get quite enough of them on the stage. I hate them off it. But tell me, in a matter of fact way, did you really believe him when he said that?”
“Oh, yes! Oh, yes! For he spoke in the most bitter, scornful, insulting manner. He said that he should leave the house, never to return while I desecrated it with my presence. Desecrated it, mind. That was what drove me away, and what will keep me away from him,” she wailed, twisting her hands together.
“Pray don’t be melodramatic, Lilith, my dear. I am so tired of that sort of thing that I have left the stage forever, I hope. But tell me quietly and sensibly when and under what circumstances Hereward talked such very objectionable nonsense.”
“It was on that fatal twenty-first of March when——”
“There you go again. There was nothing fatal about it. However, proceed.”
“It was on the twenty-first of March, then, that he came down suddenly to Cloud Cliffs. That letter which you had written to me had fallen into his hands, and he rushed down to Cloud Cliffs, just as I feared he would, in a——”
“Deuce of a rage. Quite natural under the circumstances. Well?”
“He came in just after I had read your last letter, which was even more compromising than your first, and as I was about to drop it into the fire he seized it from me——”
“Very rude of him.”
“And he read it.”