Her answer was prompt and direct. “After all that has happened, it seemed safest and wisest for me to disappear. Too many persons were becoming mixed up in my affairs—I wanted to be free from them.”
“How about Jack? Is he also in the dark as to where you are?”
“Jack knows. But I do not dare see him.”
“And these are the only reasons you disappeared so suddenly from the Grantham?”
“The only reasons,” she returned steadily. But consciously or unconsciously Mary here withheld part of the truth. There was something else: the unadmitted influence which the action of Maisie Jones had had upon her.
“Next, if I am to help you,” continued Clifford, “what are your general plans for the future? You don’t mind telling?”
“I don’t mind telling you everything.” And she went on to tell him these things which she had thought out more definitely during her solitary days. “My general plans are what they have been since I married. My main purpose at present is to keep Jack going straight—until through my influence he shall have become established as a responsible business man; this I expect to be an achievement for which I shall secure acknowledgment and which will win Mr. Morton’s favor. And then, a little later, after I have established myself with them, and have been openly before the public as Jack’s wife, I shall tell them just who I am and what I have done.”
“And having done that, what do you think will happen?”
“I shall have proved to them that I am the one person who can hold Jack to the job of being a man; and I shall have proved to them that, despite my being Mary Regan, I can make a figure as a woman that Jack and his father will be proud of before the world. That is my plan.”
The calculating worldliness of her frank scheme was amazing. Here was the strangest part of their recent relationship—she had made it a point always to show him her most worldly side.