She was standing on one side of the table and Bayre was on the other. He leaned upon it to look earnestly into her face.
“Indeed I do,” he retorted. “I say that Southerley at least has a right to know that you are a married woman, and I say that it is not fair to him to conceal the fact.”
“How—not fair?” said the lady, sinking into a chair and speaking in quite a timid and subdued voice. “How could I know that—that it mattered to him?”
“I think,” said Bayre, still leaning on the table, though she made a gesture to invite him to be seated, “that women know those things sooner than the men themselves. It seems to me that you must have seen what his feelings were, and his hopes; and though I know women do these cruel things and think little of them, yet I’m sorry that you, a member of my family and the mother of that child, should be so heartless.”
“Heartless! I’m not that,” replied Miss Merriman.
And as she looked up with the tears raining down her face, Bayre felt compunction at his own severity.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I suppose I have no right to speak like this. But surely you might have trusted us. Don’t you think so?”
Miss Merriman was silent for a few moments, wiping her eyes quietly, and sobbing a little. Then she seemed suddenly to make up her mind to a great effort, and looking up, she pointed to a chair and said, peremptorily,—
“Sit down. You shall not scold me without hearing a word in my defence. I begin to think you’re as hard, as impossible, as your uncle himself.”
Bayre sat down. He was longing to hear something of the strange story she had to tell, and was quite ready to admit that all the fault of his uncle’s unhappy marriage had not been on the side of the wife.