“You ARE going to be open with me—Edith!” he pleaded, softly.
She turned from him a little, as if to hide the signs of her agitation. “Oh, what is there to say?” she demanded, in a tone which was almost a wail. “It is not your fault. I'm not blaming you.”
“WHAT is not my fault?” he persisted with patient gentleness.
Suddenly she confronted him. There were the traces of tears upon her lashes, and serenity had fled from her face. “It is a mistake—a blunder,” she began, hurriedly. “I take it all upon my own shoulders. I was the one who did it. I should have had more judgment—more good sense!”
“You are not telling me, are you,” he asked with gravity, “that you are sorry you married me?”
“Is either of us glad?” she retorted, breathlessly. “What is there to be glad about? You are bored to death—you confess it. And I—well, it is not what I thought it would be. I deceived myself. I do not reproach you.”
“No, you keep saying that,” he observed, with gloomy slowness of utterance. “But what is it you reproach yourself with, then? We might as well have it out.”
“Yes,” she assented, with a swift reversion to calm. Her eyes met his with a glance which had in it an implacable frankness. “I married one man because he would be able to make me a Duchess. I married another because he had eighty thousand a year. That is the kind of beast I am. There is bad blood in me. You know my father; that is quite enough. I am his daughter; that explains everything.”
The exaggeration of her tone and words produced a curious effect upon him. He stared at her for a little, perceiving slowly that a new personage was being revealed to him. The mask of delicately-balanced cynicism, of amiably polite indifference, had been lifted; there was a woman of flesh and blood beneath it, after all—a woman to whom he could talk on terms of intimacy.
“Rubbish!” he said, and his big face lightened into a genial, paternal smile. “You didn't marry me for my money at all! What nonsense! I simply came along and carried you off. You couldn't help yourself. It would have been the same if I hadn't had sixpence.”