“You’re talking of Dudley Leicester?” she said, and slowly she removed her arm from beneath his hand. She stood up in front of him, clear and cool in her grey dress, and he recovered his mastery of himself.
“But, of course,” he went on, “that’s only a sort of nightmare, and you’re going to put an end to it. If we start back now you could see him to-night.”
She put her hands behind her back, and said with a distinct and clear enunciation: “I am not going to.” He looked at her without much comprehension.
“Well, to-morrow, then. Next week. Soon?”
“I am not going to at all,” she brought out still more hardly. “Not to-day. Not this week. Not ever.” And before his bewilderment she began to speak with a passionate scorn: “This is what I was to discover beneath the weathercock! Do you consider what a ridiculous figure you out? You bring me here to talk about that man. What’s he to you, or you to him? Why should you maunder and moon and worry about him?”
“But ...” Robert Grimshaw said, and she burst into a hard laugh.
“No wonder you can’t give in to me if you’ve got to be thinking of him all the time. Well, put it how you will, I have done with him, and I’ve done with you. Go your own idiotic ways together. I’ve done with you.” And with her hands stretched down in front of her she snapped the handle of her parasol, her face drawn and white. She looked down at the two pieces contemptuously, and threw them against the iron-bolted, oak church door. “That’s an end of it,” she said.
Grimshaw looked up at her, with his jaw dropping in amazement.
“But you’re jealous!” he said.
She kept herself calm for a minute longer.