"I am on friendly terms," I said rather pointedly. "I am fortunately not the kind of person who indulges in seeming friendship."
"Oh, I say, Miss Fielding, don't rub it in on a fellow! Don't you see that I have been half crazy ever since I found it out? Surely you don't think that the matter hasn't made me feel worse cut up than anything that ever happened to me before! A man doesn't get over a shock like that!"
"Shock?"
"Certainly shock," he repeated earnestly. "If she had told me she is a horse-thief I couldn't have felt worse. Of course a man could keep up a sort of pitying friendliness after such an acknowledgment as that, but—I had intended asking her that night to marry me."
He looked at me as if he might be beseeching me to speak a word of comfort to him, but I stood there and said nothing.
"Miss Fielding, surely you understand that I couldn't marry a woman who, by her own acknowledgment, is a—a dope-fiend."
"Dope-fiend!" I gave a little shriek.
He looked at me a moment as if he thought I had lost my mind, then we were both startled by the abrupt entrance of Mrs. Chalmers at the door which I had a few minutes before left open. She had evidently heard my horrified exclamation and come in to investigate. She looked from one to the other of us inquiringly, and there was no use trying to hide the situation from her.
"Miss Fielding and I were talking about Sophie, Mrs. Chalmers," Mr. Maxwell explained after a moment of painful silence. "She acknowledged to us, Miss Fielding and me, the other night the—the truth about this unhappy condition."
"The truth?" Mrs. Chalmers' tone was questioning, although I knew that she must have heard my startled cry as I repeated the hideous word he had used a moment before.