The retreat was closed. Lady Noël, with sparkling eyes and spare figure leaning on her cane, faced them at the threshold, her gaze leaping with flickering triumph. At the same instant Annabel entered by the other door.
The trap had sprung, the joints were working with precision. Gordon’s first glance at his wife’s face told him there had been betrayal, for the look he saw was not of surprise or wonder, though its indignant lines set themselves deeper in presence of the visible fact. The jaws of this trap had not been set by accident. How had Lady Noël and Annabel guessed? The latter’s eyes were on the carboy’s costume, as if she would convince herself doubly by every evidence of her senses. The grim figure on the threshold pointed one thin forefinger at the shrinking form in the boy’s dress.
“Take off that cap!”
Annabel took a quick step forward, as Lady Caroline snatched off the covering to show a face flaming with defiance. “Caro!” she exclaimed—“Caro!”
As she looked from one to the other, contempt rose in a frigid wave over her features and she drew herself up to her full height and stood stonily erect.
Lady Noël laughed with an echoing amusement, as Lady Caroline burst out in a torrent:
“You can hate and despise me if you want to, Bella. It can make no difference to me. Why did you come between us in the first place? You never loved him, at least. You had nothing to give him but that horrible virtuous indifference of yours—nothing! nothing! You have nothing to give him now. You have made his life wretched with your perfectness and your conventions! Everybody knows that!”
Annabel’s look swept her with its sharp edge of scorn; then flashed on Gordon, who stood composed, motionless, in a grip of repression.
“Is it not enough for you to have made me the butt of your daily caprice, your shameless atheism?”—she drove the words at her husband—“for all London to gossip of your social ‘conquests’ and your dissolute affairs? Is this not enough—that you offer me the final dishonor of such planned meetings, under this roof?”
“It was not his fault!” cried Lady Caroline. “Bella! I will tell you the truth!”