She smiled coldly. His arrogant rhetoric recalled annoyingly William’s pride in the Graynor Honour. They both seemed to fear these things were in jeopardy through her. The tissue-paper wrappings in which they preserved these qualities appeared to her as consistent as they were inadequate. There was a hollow ring in all this noisy talk. Respect was to her a personal attribute, which revealed itself daily in the commonplace round of homely things. She was not in the least concerned as to its chance of safe keeping in her possession.
“I’ll go to bed,” she said. “It isn’t very profitable to stay here wrangling at this hour of night. And to-morrow I will go home. I want to get away. I am weary of everything.”
“This is your home,” he said sharply. Prudence looked at him strangely.
“This has never been home to me,” she replied. “It is your home. It is more your mother’s home than mine. I have not even authority to order the meals, or direct the household.”
“That’s your own fault,” he returned curtly. “You evinced no interest in these matters.”
“Largely, it is my own fault,” she agreed, with surprising meekness. “I am responsible for the arrangement of my life, and I have done it very badly.”
She was perilously near to weeping. She felt that if she did not escape immediately she would break down in front of him, and that was the last thing she desired to happen. But he would not let her go at once. He detained her while he put further questions to her relative to Steele. Had she made any arrangement to meet him again? That was a suspicion which had jerked itself into his mind and would not be dislodged. He was jealous of the man. It was jealousy which had lashed him to his mood of unreasonable anger; it was jealousy which prompted him to ask this question of her, though in his heart he did not believe her capable of that.
“What do you take me for?” she demanded fiercely, and shook off his detaining hand as if it stung her. “I am going away in order to avoid meeting him. Oh! let me go. I can’t stand any more to-night. If you had been wise you would have kept silent and let me bury this thing in the most secret place of my heart. There are things one ought not to speak of.”
“I have a right to your full confidence,” he said.
“Ah!” she cried, and brushed a tear away. “If you only knew how much you lose in insisting on your rights!”