In the midst of her grief Mrs. Dale looked up in the girl’s face with a sad smile.
“Oh, she has dared so much more than that already!” she said hopelessly. “I don’t want to excuse myself—nothing can excuse me—but I want you to know the share she had in it all. For she had a share. It would never have happened but for her.”
Mrs. Dale sprang to her feet, and walking up and down the room with her little white hands clinched till the nails marked her flesh, she began to pour into the young girl’s ears a story which kept her hearer fascinated, spellbound.
“Listen, listen!” said Mrs. Dale in a low, breathless voice, without glancing at the girl. “It is not a story for you; I would never have told you a word of it if it had not been forced upon us both. But now, as you have heard so much, told in one way, you must hear the rest, told in another.”
Mabin said nothing.
In fact, it seemed to her that Mrs. Dale hardly cared whether she listened or not. She went on with her story in the same hurried, monotonous tone, as if it was merely the relief of putting it into words that she wanted:
“I had always been spoiled, always had my own way, until I was married. My father and mother both died when I was a little thing of six, and I lived with my guardian and his family, and they let me do just as I liked. I was supposed to be rich, almost an heiress; but when my guardian died, it was found that the money had all gone; I had nothing. I was not yet eighteen then. And Sir Geoffrey Mallyan wanted to marry me. Every one said I must; that there was nothing else for me to do. I didn’t care for him; but then I didn’t care for any one else; so nobody thought it mattered. It was taken for granted, don’t you see, that there was no question of my saying no.”
Mrs. Dale stopped short, and for the first time looked at Mabin:
“That’s what people always think, that it doesn’t matter whom a girl marries, if she’s very young. But it does, oh, it does! And he had a brother——”
Mabin started, and thought at once of Mr. Banks.