'I cannot talk about them now, I'm too tired.'
There was a petulant note in her voice which told Harold that it would be useless to question her. He smoked his pipe and listened, and, in her low musical and so well-modulated voice, she continued her tale about herself, M. Delacour, La Voix du Peuple, and M. Darres. Her conversation was full of names and allusions to matters of which Harold knew nothing. He failed to follow her tale, and his thoughts reverted to the loss of three thousand pounds in the shocking Voix du Peuple and two thousand in scandalous Panama. Every now and then something surprising in her tale caught his ear, he asked for precise information, but Mildred answered evasively and turned the conversation. She was much more interested in the influence M. Delacour had exercised over her. She admitted that she had liked him very much, and attributed the influence he had exercised to hypnotism and subordination of will. She had, however, refused to run away with him when he had asked her.
'You mean to say that he asked you to run away with him—a married man?'
'Yes; but I said no. I knew that it would ruin him to run away with me. I told him that he must not go away either with me or alone, that he must face his enemies and overcome them. I was a true friend.'
'It is most extraordinary. You must have been very intimate for him to propose such a thing.'
'Yes; we were very intimate, but, when it came to the point, I felt that I couldn't.'
'Came to the point!'
It was impossible to lead Mildred into further explanation, and she spoke of the loss of the paper. It had passed into the hands of M. Darres; he had changed the staff; he had refused her articles, that was the extraordinary part; explained the unwisdom Darres had showed in his editorship. The paper was now a wreck. He had changed its policy, and the circulation had sunk from sixty to twenty-five thousand. Harold cared nothing whether La Voix du Peuple was well or badly edited, except so far as its prosperity promised hope of the recovery of the money Mildred had invested in it; and he had begun to feel that the paper was not responsible for M. Delacour's debts, and that Mildred's money was lost irretrievably. He was thinking of M. Delacour and the proposal he had made to Mildred, that they should go away together. M. Delacour, a married man! But his wife must have been aware of her husband's intimacy, of his love for Mildred.
'But wasn't Madame Delacour jealous of you, of your intimacy with her husband?'
'She knew there was nothing wrong…. But she accused me of kissing her husband; that was spite.'