With this, he turned in his seat, and calmly confronted her. Beautiful she certainly was, at that moment; but it was the beauty of an angry serpent. She had a pencil in her hand, with which, a little while before, she had been sketching heads of some of the passengers in her little notebook. She was now handling this inoffensive object in such a way as to justify the fancy that, had it been charged with a deadly poison in its point, instead of with a bit of plumbago of the HH quality, she would have driven it into Freeman’s heart then and there.
“Is it no insult,” said she, in a sibilant voice, “to talk to me as you are doing, when you have just told me that you love another woman, and are going to meet her?”
Freeman’s brows gradually knitted themselves in a frown of apparent perplexity. “I must say I don’t understand you,” he observed, at length. “I am quite sure I have said nothing of the sort. How could I?”
“If you wish to quibble about words, perhaps not. But was not that your meaning?”
“No, it wasn’t. You are the only woman who has been in my thoughts to-day.”
“Mr. Freeman!”
“Well?”
“You have intimated very clearly that you are engaged—married, for aught I know—to a woman whom you are now on your way to meet——”
At this point she stopped. Freeman had interrupted her with a shout of laughter.
She had been very pale. She now flushed all over her face, and jumped to her feet.