"Lord Deerehurst? What about Lord Deerehurst?" Her voice was high and strained.
Gore made a gesture of contempt.
"Deerehurst——" he began hotly; then suddenly his tone changed.
"Mrs. Milbanke," he said earnestly, "whatever you may say, whatever you may do, I cannot believe that in your heart you are in sympathy with these people, whose one object in life is to gamble—to gamble with honour, money, emotion—anything, everything that has the savour of risk and the possibility of gain.
"You have no justification for belonging to these people. You have the good things of life, the things many women are forced to steal—position, a home, a good husband——"
At the last word Clodagh started violently. And with a quick impulsive movement, Gore turned to her afresh.
"You are intoxicated with life—or what seems to you to be life! You are forgetting realities. I have seen your husband. He is an honest, simple, trustworthy man—who loves you."
The tone of his voice came to Clodagh with great distinctness. It seemed the only living thing in a world that had suddenly become dead. While she had been sitting rigid and erect in the stern of the gondola, everything had altered to her mental vision—everything had undergone a fundamental change. The purple twilight; the mysterious night scents; the breezes blown in from the lagoon had become intangible, meaningless things. She was conscious of nothing but Gore's clear words, of her own soul, stripped of its self-deception. At last, with a faint movement, she turned towards him.
"Take me home," she said in a numbed voice. "I wish to go home."
At the words, he wheeled round in sudden protest. But as his eyes rested on her cold face, a tinge of self-consciousness chilled his zeal—self-consciousness, and the suddenly remembered fact that his own action was, after all, unjustifiable. His own figure suddenly stiffened.