“You own you want it yourself!” she cried relentlessly.
The other still gazed at her for a moment, and then her mood changed. The fire died out of her eyes, her look relaxed; she laughed, though not mirthfully.
“Ah, well,” she said, “I have already made you a present of the situation, so far as I am concerned. Doesn’t that mollify you?”
“So far as you are concerned!” Claudia repeated with scorn. “Oh, you are very much concerned! The situation, as far as I can read it, is that you are trying to persuade me to take myself out of the way, in order that you may feel still more perfectly free.”
Miss Arbuthnot looked at her once more.
“Do you not see,” she said slowly and cruelly, “that you are not in the way? It is what he cannot have which has the attraction for Arthur Fenwick.”
Was it so? The girl breathed hard, and put the question a second time.
“Then why do you speak?” She had forgotten Helen’s words.
“Ah, why? That’s what I have asked myself half a dozen times in as many minutes. Answer it as you like. Perhaps I love meddling.”
She turned as she spoke, and began to walk towards the club-house. Claudia, hot, bewildered, angry, marched by her side, unwilling either to go with her or to remain behind. She felt bruised and beaten, yet, after all, the pain came from an unacknowledged source. Were they not her own convictions which had taken shape from the mouth of another?