“I don’t quite know what to do with you. If I send you to Mrs. Bonnington, I shall have to tell some shocking tarradiddle about the drains having come up, or the roof having given way, and she will be sure to find me out and to pry, and to give both of us what the old women call ‘much unpleasantness.’ And if I send you on to Geneva, I don’t know whether they will be glad to see you when you arrive.”
“And I’m sure they won’t,” said Mabin heartily. “And there is one other objection to sending me anywhere, and that is that I won’t go.”
Mrs. Dale dropped her sweet-peas, and turned round. Her eyes were full of sudden tears.
“Nonsense, child!” she said sharply, but in a querulous tone which betrayed her emotion, “nonsense! It was decided yesterday afternoon that you were to go. You know it was.”
“You decided that I was to go. I didn’t. And—” instinctively she dropped her voice—“And something that happened last night—in the night, made me decide not to go. There!”
“But, my dear——”
“No, Mrs. Dale, I’m not to be ‘got round.’ You’ve chosen to take me upon your shoulders, so now you must just keep me. Ha, ha! You didn’t know I had so much determination, did you?”
But Mrs. Dale could scarcely speak. Now for the first time that morning Mabin realized that the scene of the night had really taken place, for the emotion aroused by this little bit of talk had brought back into Mrs. Dale’s blue eyes a faint reproduction of the wild terror she had shown when she came to the girl’s room. When she had recovered her voice, the lady in black, pale, hoarse, shaken with her agitation, stammered out these words:
“My dear girl, it is beautiful of you to offer to stay. But I cannot let you. You ought never to have come. I was mad, wicked to let you come; and my madness and my wickedness I must bear alone.”
How strange these words seemed in the broad daylight, Mabin thought! By the weak glimmer of the night-light Mrs. Dale’s wild looks and words had seemed fantastic, weird. But the broad sunlight seemed to give the nameless horror which hung about the poor little lady in black a reality as vivid as it was painful. But with this feeling there came also into the heart of the young girl a great tenderness toward the suffering woman, who was haunted by the shadow of her own past. So she smiled, and with a pretty, half-shy look in her eyes, said: