“Yes!” returned his lordship. “But you need not look so smug, Bella, for he has not come to Bath on your account! He was strolling along, as bold as brass, with my wife hanging on his arm!”
“ Oh!” gasped Miss Milborne, in quite another voice. “Oh, Sherry, no!”
“He was, I tell you!” said the Viscount, taking a few hasty paces about the room and kicking an offending bandbox out of his path.
Miss Milborne clasped her hands together, and said in a strictly controlled tone: “I told you — I told you, Sherry, that he had a marked partiality for Hero! It was the first thing that sprang to my mind when I learned of her having left you. But that he could have — all this time — Oh, it is too base!”
“Only wait until I come upon him face to face!” Sherry said through his locked teeth.
She covered her eyes with one hand. “I was never more shocked in my life! I do not know what to say! You do not think — might it not be possible that he met Hero in Bath by chance?”
“No doubt that is what he will try to make us believe!” Sherry said, with a savage little laugh. “But it is doing it a trifle too brown! Now I know why he was so urgent with me not to come to Bath! Now I see it all! Why, he must have posted here ahead of me the instant he was apprised of my having taken the resolve of coming with my mother!”
“And she!” Miss Milborne said throbbingly. “Oh, I had not thought it of her!”
“Yes, you had!” retorted the Viscount, rounding on her. “It is precisely what you did think, Bella! And there’s not a word of truth in it, and if you dare to say it again I’ll choke you!”
“Pray do not be thinking you can talk to me like that!” said Miss Milborne, bristling.“ I am not your unfortunate wife, thank heaven!”