“It matters a great deal to me,” she said. “I should be very sorry if Laura were to make an unhappy marriage.”
“But must her marriage with Launcelot Darrell be necessarily unhappy?”
“Yes; because he is a bad man.”
“What right have you to say that, unless you have some special reason for thinking it?”
“I have a special reason.”
“What reason?”
“I cannot tell you—now.”
The ravenous demon’s tooth grew sharper than usual when Eleanor said this.
“Mrs. Monckton,” the lawyer said, sternly, “I am afraid that there can be very little happiness in store for you and me if you begin your married life by keeping secrets from your husband.”
Gilbert Monckton was too proud to say more than this. A dull despair was creeping into his breast, a sick loathing of himself and of his folly. Every one of those twenty years which made him his young wife’s senior rose up against him, and gibed and twitted him.