"Then why is he marrying the other girl instead of you? If she is so beautiful, you're surely very good-looking too, eh? That won't wash anyhow, will it?"
Katharine was silent. She felt she could not reveal the full extent of his infamy just then; there was something so particularly sordid in having been weighed against the advantages of a worldly marriage and found wanting; and she felt a sudden disinclination to expose the whole of the truth to the sharp criticism of Polly Newland.
"I haven't done anything wrong," she said again. "I don't understand why things are so unfairly arranged. Why should I suffer for it like this?"
"Don't know about that," retorted the uncompromising Polly. "I expect you've been foolish, and that's a worse game than being bad. Going about town with a man after dark, when you're not engaged to him, isn't considered respectable by most, even if it's always the same man. I'm not so particular as some, but you must draw the line somewhere."
"I didn't go about with him much," said Katharine, making a feeble attempt to justify herself. "He didn't care about it; he was always so particular not to give people anything to talk about. He didn't care for himself, he said; it was only for me. So I used to go to his chambers instead. I couldn't be more careful than that, could I? And I should have gone in the daytime, if I had had more time; but there was all my work to get through,—so what else could I do? There wasn't any harm in it."
She could not see her companion's face, and was so full of her own reflections that she failed to notice her silence. Polly did not even sniff.
"Then there's Ted," Katharine continued presently. "Even Ted was strange to-night; and Ted has never been like that to me before. I can't think what has come over everybody. What have I done to deserve it all?"
"Mercy me!" cried Polly suddenly. "Is there another of them? Who on earth is Ted?"
"Ted? Why, you must have seen him in the hall sometimes; he often comes to take me out. I have known him all my life; he is only a little older than I am, and I am devoted to him. I would not quarrel with Ted for anything in the whole world; it would be like quarrelling with myself. And to-night I ran into him, just as I came out of—of the other one's chambers; and I was so glad to see him, because Ted is always so sweet to me when I am in trouble; and—and Ted was quite funny, and he wouldn't speak to me at all, and he just put me into a hansom and left me to come home alone. I can't think why he behaved so oddly. I know he used not to get on with—with the other one, and that is why I never told him I had met him again up here in London; and I suppose he caught sight of him to-night in the doorway,—there was a lamp just above,—but still, he need not have been hurt until he had heard my explanation, need he? Why has every one turned against me at once?"
Polly remained silent no longer. She turned and stared at the prostrate figure on the bed, with all the power of her small, watery blue eyes.