She made no answer. I turned presently, a movement of enquiry.
“I was afraid you meant to do that,” she said.
“I'm out of touch,” I explained. “Altogether.”
“Oh! I know.”
“It places me in a difficult position,” I said.
Margaret stood at her dressing-table, looking steadfastly at herself in the glass, and with her fingers playing with a litter of stoppered bottles of tinted glass. “I was afraid it was coming to this,” she said.
“In a way,” I said, “we've been allies. I owe my seat to you. I couldn't have gone into Parliament....”
“I don't want considerations like that to affect us,” she interrupted.
There was a pause. She sat down in a chair by her dressing-table, lifted an ivory hand-glass, and put it down again.
“I wish,” she said, with something like a sob in her voice, “it were possible that you shouldn't do this.” She stopped abruptly, and I did not look at her, because I could feel the effort she was making to control herself.