"You did n't expect that?" he demanded, gratified by the sensation he had created.
"No," Leigh heard himself reply, in a voice that sounded far away. "That makes it all the more—interesting. Then you were married secretly?"
"Not for two years or more; but we met from time to time. I can't help wondering now why nobody suspected the truth. Of course the boys chaffed me a good deal, and asked to be invited to the wedding, but they were miles short of guessing the real state of affairs. Sometimes I noticed her friends putting their heads together and knew they were discussing me, for they stopped whispering when I came up for their fares. But even so I heard casual remarks. Some said it was sweet of her—the way women talk, you know—and democratic, and others said it was no use trying to do anything for that kind of people."
"Mrs. Parr, for example?"
"Yes," Emmet burst out, his eyes flashing redly, "but I 'll show that singed cat yet what kind of people I am! I 'll show her and her whole damned set!" His anger almost choked him, and his face grew crimson. "She's part of the story, too," he went on, "but she does n't come in yet. However, if there were two people in Warwick that suspected anything serious, it was that woman and Professor Cardington."
"Not the bishop?" Leigh asked.
"I don't think so, though he did freeze me in that way of his that you can't put your finger on. He's as proud as Lucifer, and would as soon have thought of his daughter falling in love with some little Dago on the street as with me. But all the same, he did n't approve of her interest in me, and he managed to make it evident."
Leigh had a vision of the blow that awaited the bishop's pride. He even wondered whether the disclosure would kill him, but he made no comment. In his own heart a sense of anger deadened for the time being his sense of loss. Since his discovery of the fact that she was a married woman, her treatment of him appeared so much more heartless that he felt he could never forgive her.
"We were married in New York," Emmet explained. "It was in September. The bishop was off on a visitation; Mrs. Parr was in Europe. We met"—
"Never mind," Leigh interrupted, shrinking. "Tell me where the other woman comes in."