... Just a minute longer. If he can hang on to silence a minute longer.... The half-dead fire shifted. He felt her stop on the threshold to answer his question.
"It's such a fine night. I wanted a stroll."
A screaming gust of wind and rain shook and rattled at the panes—and a fibre of Gareth's brain seemed to twitch and snap. A fine night ... what sort of an idiot did she take him for? He would show her.
"You lie. You were going to join your lover."
... Not even now was he sure if he had said it, or if that absurd little black china cat were still playing its tricks. His back was to the door. He waited to hear it close behind her. That would indicate that all was well, and that she had gone. No sound. He turned ... saw from her face that it had not been the black china cat who had spoken the words:
"You lie. You were going to join your lover."
Her smile had slipped away—and quite right that it should!—smile that belonged to eighteen, not to forty-three. And she was aware of him now, Gareth noted exultantly; was waiting in stunned amaze for his next utterance. Well, since he had once broken bounds, it might come in full force, dramatic recrimination he had all this while suppressed. He had lost all sense of consequences, of the ultimate issue at stake; seized, for the second time in his life, by an irresistible storm of action. Just on and on, not seeing whether he was going—and who could now assert that Gareth Temple wasn't a strong man!
"You thought I saw nothing, did you? thought I swallowed all your stupid little lies; held me for stupider than the lies, did you? Well, I know. You were going to-night—not coming back—packing your clothes ... all those weeks you've been plotting it, you—with that smile forever on your face, and making yourself beautiful, for him; and buying clothes, for him. And I knew! I knew! For every falsehood you gave me, I gave you back another with my silence. Not—not quite such a fool as you took me to be, Kathleen...."
He was forced to stop, overtaken by a spasm of coughing; clutched for support at the corner of the table.
Kathleen had time to recover from her first numbness of surprise. The expected hitch to her plans had occurred. No matter! she could cope with more than this for the attainment of El Dorado. Gareth could not prevent her departure; let him but have his say, so it be a quick one; and then——