Laura turned again and stopped her, holding her arm as she passed toward the door. 'Will you swear—will you swear by everything that is most sacred?'
'Will I swear what?' And now she thought Selina visibly blanched.
'That you didn't lay eyes on Captain Crispin in Paris.'
Mrs. Berrington hesitated, but only for an instant. 'You are really too odious, but as you are pinching me to death I will swear, to get away from you. I never laid eyes on him.'
The organs of vision which Mrs. Berrington was ready solemnly to declare that she had not misapplied were, as her sister looked into them, an abyss of indefinite prettiness. The girl had sounded them before without discovering a conscience at the bottom of them, and they had never helped any one to find out anything about their possessor except that she was one of the beauties of London. Even while Selina spoke Laura had a cold, horrible sense of not believing her, and at the same time a desire, colder still, to extract a reiteration of the pledge. Was it the asseveration of her innocence that she wished her to repeat, or only the attestation of her falsity? One way or the other it seemed to her that this would settle something, and she went on inexorably—'By our dear mother's memory—by our poor father's?'
'By my mother's, by my father's,' said Mrs. Berrington, 'and by that of any other member of the family you like!' Laura let her go; she had not been pinching her, as Selina described the pressure, but had clung to her with insistent hands. As she opened the door Selina said, in a changed voice: 'I suppose it's no use to ask you if you care to drive to Plash.'
'No, thank you, I don't care—I shall take a walk.'
'I suppose, from that, that your friend Lady Davenant has gone.'
'No, I think she is still there.'
'That's a bore!' Selina exclaimed, as she went off.