Anger leapt into her eyes.
“You allow yourself strong expressions, Mr Wareham!”
“If you do not like them it appears to me that I am the last person to whom you should speak. You may not know what Hugh is to me.”
“If I did not, I should not be talking to you at this moment,” she retorted, flinging back her head. “Should I discuss the subject with an indifferent person?”
It had been good to him to feel the impetus of his own anger, he courted, encouraged it. A secret fear made him dread a softer mood. He kept his eyes upon a butterfly, balancing itself on an ear of rye. As he did not answer, she went on—
“Taking it from your point of view only, for I suppose you would be incapable of a broader outlook, do you consider a lingering end more merciful than one which is short and sharp? I have never for a moment regretted the manner of the doing.”
“You have regretted something,” said Wareham quickly, recognising that she laid a scarcely-perceptible stress on one word, and beginning to think that she intended him to undertake the mission of reconciliation. A drag of reluctance he believed to belong to disapproval.
“Perhaps,” she said, with hesitation.
“Isn’t it a little late?”
It struck him that his question had an offensive air, but she appeared not to have heard it; she was looking beyond him at the glowing lake, and the mountains which bordered the green waters.