"Ill news?" Madeleine repeated affrightedly. "Is anything the matter? Has anything happened to one of the children? Don't keep me in suspense, Jacques. I am not cold-blooded—like you!"
"The children are all right," he said shortly. "But there has been, as you evidently know, an accident. The submarine Neptune has met with a serious mishap. She now lies with her crew in eighteen fathoms of water about two miles out."
He spoke with cold acerbity. How childishly foolish of Madeleine to try and deceive him! But all women of the type to which she belonged make foolish mysteries about nothing.
"The submarine Neptune?" As she stammered out the question which had already been answered, there came over Madame Baudoin's face a look of measureless terror. Twice her lips opened—and twice she closed them again.
At last she uttered a few words—words of anguished protest and revolt. "No, no," she cried, "that can't be—it's impossible!"
"Command yourself!" he said sternly. "Remember what would be thought by anyone who saw you in this state."
But she went on looking at him with wild, terror-stricken eyes. "My poor Claire!" she moaned. "My little sister Claire——"
All Jacques de Wissant's jealousy leapt into eager, quivering life. Then he had been right after all? His wife loved Dupré. Her sister's anguished sympathy had betrayed Claire's secret as nothing Claire herself was ever likely to say or do could have done.
"You are a good sister," he said ironically, "to take Claire's distress so much to heart. Identifying yourself as entirely as you seem to do with her, I am surprised that you did not accompany her into Falaise: it was most wrong of you to let her go alone."
"Claire is not in Falaise," muttered Madeleine. She was grasping the back of one of the cane chairs with her hand as if glad of even that slight support, staring at him with a dazed look of abject misery which increased his anger, his disgust.