“Mein Gott! I see. You do mean that you are in love with him yourself?”
“Yes, I suppose that is what I mean. At any rate, he is my husband—I have a right to him.”
Again Lady Devene reflected, then said:
“I always did wonder if it would end so. If you can come to care, pity it was not long ago. Why have you put it off so long, Edith? Now I think that perhaps it will be too late. What’s your English proverb?—one day behind the fair.”
“If that is all you have to say, you might have stopped in your room,” answered Edith, between her sobs.
“Himmel! what more can I say than the truth? I did not cook this pudding, Edith. You cook it, and you must eat it. What is the good to cry out that it is nasty now. Still I am sorry for you, my poor Edith, who find out that if you throw enough stones into the air, sometimes one fall upon your head.”
“Go away, please,” said Edith; “I don’t want to be pitied, and I don’t want to be lectured. Leave me alone to eat what you call my pudding.”
“Very well,” answered Tabitha quietly, “but you take my advice, you ask God to make it sweeter, which you always forget to do.”
“I have forgotten too long, I am afraid,” said Edith, throwing herself down again on the angarib and turning her face to the wall.
There were other sore hearts in Tama that night. For instance, Rupert could not fail to see, if not all, at any rate a great deal of what was passing in his wife’s mind. He understood that she was earnestly sorry for what she had done and heartily wished it undone. He was sure, also, from his knowledge of their previous close relations, from the by no means obscure hints that she gave him, and from what he observed of them when they were together, that throughout she had acted under the influence of Dick, who had made love to her both before their marriage and after his own supposed death, which influence no longer had weight with her, although she still greatly feared the man. Indeed, upon this matter he had other sources of information—Tabitha, who told him a great deal, and Dick himself who had tried to blacken Edith in his eyes by letting little facts escape him—accidentally. Thus it came out that he had been lunching with Edith alone on that New Year’s Eve when Rupert returned to England, and by inference that they were then on exceedingly intimate terms.