“I am looking at your rooms,” she said, with pale lips; “the rooms my husband furnished for you.”
Lisa had not even the grace to attempt a denial.
“He was very good, very generous,” she faltered, her eyes suffused with tears, those tears which came so readily to Lisa’s eyes, on the stage or off. “There never was any one so good as he.”
“He owed you at least as much as that,” said Eve, sternly. “It was the least he could do.”
“Ah, he has told you then,” cried Lisa, eagerly; “he has told you his secret.”
“No, he has not told me. He was too much ashamed to tell me of anything so infamous. He is not shameless like you,” said Eve, trembling with indignant feeling.
It was all true then, all that Sefton had told her sister; all that her own jealous fears had suggested. This woman stood before her, unabashed, ready to expatiate upon her sin.
“He has told me nothing,” she said, “or if he has spoken of you it has only been to deceive me. But there are some things that are easy to guess, when a woman has lived in the world as I have, and has heard other women talk. Two years ago perhaps I might have been fooled by his falsehoods; but I am wiser now. I knew from the first that you had been his mistress; that he was the father of that boy.”
She pointed to the unconscious Paolo, sprawling on the floor, turning the leaves of a picture-book, and doing his utmost to destroy an indestructible “Jack the Giant Killer,” printed on stout linen.
“You knew what was not true, then,” said Lisa, drawing herself up, with crimson cheeks and flaming eyes. “You pretend to know that which is false, false, una bugia indegna. He was never anything to me but a friend, my generous and noble friend. He hired this apartment for us, for la Zia and me, and he furnished these rooms, and he bought me that piano, and he paid the good Zinco to teach me to sing. E vero! I owe him my fortune, and all I have in the world. I would walk barefoot all over this earth if I could make him happier by my toil. There is nothing in this world I would not do for him.”