Diana was silent for a moment, determining what to do. All this she had expected, but she had not thought to find her brother so changed.
"Tell me, Marcantonio," she said earnestly, "did you think I would prevent your meeting with him?" He hesitated. She took his hand and looked into his face as though urging him to answer.
"Yes," he said hoarsely.
Diana understood. This was the reason of his evident annoyance at her coming. He thought she meant to prevent him from fighting Batiscombe.
"You know better than that," she said gravely. Marcantonio turned upon her quickly with an angry look.
"You prevented me before," he said. "If I had shot him then, this trouble would not have come. You know it,—why do you look at me like that?"
"If you had shot him before," said she, "this could not have happened. But if he had shot you,—that was possible, was it not?—you gained nothing. If neither of you had killed the other, there would have been a useless scandal. The case is different."
If she had found her brother overcome with his sorrow and abandoned to the suffering it brought, sensitive and shrinking from all allusion to his shame, she would have acted very differently. But she found him possessed of but one idea, how to kill Julius Batiscombe; he was hard and unyielding; he seemed to have forgotten the wife he had loved so well, in the longing to destroy the man who had stolen her away. She felt no hesitation in speaking plainly of the matter in hand, since his feelings needed no sparing. But her sympathy was so large and honest that she did not feel hurt herself because he was cold to her; she understood that he was scarcely in his right mind, and she could make all allowance for him.
Marcantonio did not answer at once. But her influence on him, as she sat there, was soothing, and he was gradually yielding under it—not in the least abandoning his one idea, but feeling that she might not hinder its execution after all.
"Do you mean to say," he asked suddenly, "that you will not try to prevent my meeting with him?" He turned and looked into her eyes, that met his honestly and fearlessly.