"I didn't know—not till to-night. I only suspected something—once ... long ago. And I couldn't—I mean—one can't say a thing like that without being quite sure——"
But here he broke down, conscious, as never before, of the negligence he had been guilty of towards Ephie. And Johanna was not likely to spare him: there was, indeed, a bitter antagonism to his half-hearted conduct in the tone in which she said: "I stood to Ephie in a mother's place. You might have warned me—oh, you might, indeed!"
They walked on in silence—a hard, resentful silence. Then Johanna put the question he was expecting to hear.
"And what has all this to do with to-night?"
Maurice took up the thread of his narrative again, telling how Ephie had waited vainly for news since returning from Switzerland, and how she had only learnt that afternoon that Schilsky had been in Leipzig, and had gone away again, without seeing her, or letting her know that he did not intend to return.
"And how did she hear it?"
"At a friend's house."
"What friend?"
"A friend of mine, a—No; I had better be frank with you: the girl this fellow was engaged to for a year or more."
"And Ephie did not know that?"