“Well! What’s the matter? Where’s the difficulty? Does your husband object to that? You don’t mean to say that he wants you to appropriate the girl’s clothes?”
“Mr. Marlow!”
“Well, but you talk of a painful difference of opinion with your husband, and then, when I ask for information on the point, you bring out a valise. And only a few moments ago you reproached me for not being serious. I wonder who is the serious person of us two now.”
She smiled faintly and in a friendly tone, from which I concluded at once that she did not mean to show me the girl’s letter, she said that undoubtedly the letter disclosed an understanding between Captain Anthony and Flora de Barral.
“What understanding?” I pressed her. “An engagement is an understanding.”
“There is no engagement—not yet,” she said decisively. “That letter, Mr. Marlow, is couched in very vague terms. That is why—”
I interrupted her without ceremony.
“You still hope to interfere to some purpose. Isn’t it so? Yes? But how should you have liked it if anybody had tried to interfere between you and Mr. Fyne at the time when your understanding with each other could still have been described in vague terms?”
She had a genuine movement of astonished indignation. It is with the accent of perfect sincerity that she cried out at me:
“But it isn’t at all the same thing! How can you!”