Wantele began walking up and down the room with long nervous strides. Then he stopped short—"What is it you mean to do, Richard?" he asked.
Richard Maule hesitated. He knew very well what he now meant to do, but he did not intend that his cousin should have any inkling, either now or hereafter, of his decision. And Dick, as he knew well, was not easily deceived. Still, he put his mind, the mind which was in some ways clearer, harder, than it had been before his illness, to the task.
"There are three courses open to me," he said slowly. "The one is to allow matters to remain as they are, in statu quo; the second is to do what Jane Oglander suggests—allow my wife to bring a suit for the dissolution of our marriage, and to allow it to go undefended—it is that which I should have done, Dick, had your answer been other than it was."
"And the third course?" Wantele was looking at his cousin fixedly.
"The third course, which I may probably adopt, will be for me to begin proceedings for divorce. I take it that Lingard knows nothing of the real woman? I mean, he looks at Athena as she looks at herself?"
Wantele nodded. That was certainly a good way in which to describe Lingard's mental attitude.
"But I have not quite made up my mind as to the best course," said Richard Maule. "I shall think the matter over for a day or two. But I fear—and I don't mind telling you, Dick, that the thought isn't exactly a pleasant one to me—that it must be what I said just now."
He beckoned to the other to come nearer, and Wantele did so, his pale face full of pain and anger.
"I want you to understand," his cousin added, in a low voice, "that when I've said that I've said all. The business won't affect me as it would most men. I never gave a thought to the world's opinion in old days, and why should I do so now?"
He spoke hesitatingly, awkwardly. It was disagreeable to him to be thus lying to his cousin—to be filling the heart of the man who loved him with a flood of indignant pity and pain. But the tragi-comedy had to be played out.