"But, Ferdie, she can't be as bad as that. No woman could. People often make mistakes, you know, and she may have found that—that—after all, her heart was really his."
He rose and stared at her rudely. "Like one of the awful women in your novels! I tell you, it was the legacy that did it. Perfectly revolting, because, after all," he added with an odious, fatuous laugh, "all other things being equal, it's me she loves. Why, I never saw a woman——" he broke off, seeming to realise suddenly the bad taste of his attitude. "But that's not the point," he went on, nervously—"the point is this——"
She drew a long breath and clenched her hands in her lap to fortify herself for the coming scene. Nothing, she knew, not even the real suffering he had been through, could induce Ferdie to forego a dramatic scene.
"Hum," he cleared his throat violently and Mrs. Walbridge, instinctively true to her wifely duty, answered:
"Yes, Ferdinand?"
"Well," he made a little gesture with his handsome hand, which struck her as being not quite so clean as usual. "I have done wrong, and—I beg your pardon." His voice was sonorous and most musical, and as he finished speaking he dropped his head on his breast in a kind of splendid compromise between the attitude of shame and a court bow.
"I—I forgive you, Ferdie, of course, I forgive you," but she knew that he had not yet got his money's worth out of the situation.
"Violet," he began again—and then as if for the first time, he looked at her, not as a refuge, or a feather-bed, or a soothing draught, but as a woman. "Why, what——" he stammered, staring, "what have you been doing with yourself? You look—different somehow. You look years younger, and—and where did you get that gown?" To her dismay he ended on a sharp note of suspicion.
"I bought it in Paris," she answered quietly.
"Bought it? Why, it is worth twenty guineas, if it's worth a penny! Violet, I—I hope you have not been—forgetting that you are my wife, while I have been away?"