"She treated you badly, in my opinion, and I'm hanged if I don't give you your revenge now—even at the price of your modesty. When you left town suddenly, after making an intolerable bear of yourself for three months on end, we all prophesied—and Mrs. Ogilvie was sure—that you would come back. But you didn't, and Sybil began to feel it. The others said that she merely missed the most pronounced of those delicate little flirtations of hers, which did no one the least harm in the world—except the odd idiots who took her seriously. But I fancied it was more than that, and I've proved it since. The woman is wild for you; if I were to tell her you were here, she would forget—the interim—would forget every mortal thing except that she wanted you; she'd come——"
"Then for God's sake keep her away!" cried Griff, fervently.
"Her husband died in the spring, you know. Sybil is a changed woman, but she hasn't the heart even to pretend that it is due to his death. She just mopes, Lomax, and if revenge is any satisfaction to you, you've got it—as much as a man could want."
Griff went back through those fevered months—recalled how the touch of her hand had maddened him, how the curve of her baby lips had seemed to be the end and aim of all things. Yet, for the life of him, he could not make a substantial working memory of it now. The thing he had called love showed merely as a spineless, filmy ghost; the thing he knew to be love stood between him and the woman who had seduced him in all but the letter.
"Dereham," he said abruptly, "will you come and see my wife?"
"I was going to ask if I might. It's generous of you to suggest it after——"
"Never mind that. Will you come?"
"Yes; when?"
"To-morrow, if you can get off. Drop in for lunch—I call it dinner now—and we'll give you mutton and apple-dumplings."
"I bar the dumplings, but otherwise you may depend on me. Is your quarrel with Laverack serious, by the way?"