He lifted the unsteady hand and laid it open, heavily again upon the table where the Crown Derby coffee services, the silver inkstands, muffineers and bridge boxes, whose donors had not even been thanked, jingled with a tiny music once more.
"Certain. Now, don't keep repeating that word, Hannah. I don't want to waste time producing proofs, but I've got them. It's as certain as death. And it's not the only thing. Once I was on his track—late in the day as it was—I learnt more. We live so in a hole, down here, and nothing like this has ever come near us. We've taken people for what they seemed to be—as I, ass that I was, took Marston—and never poked into their histories. The man's got a bad record, all along. Decent people have closed their doors in his face."
"What will you do, Hugh? What can you do now?"
"Do? Stop the marriage," he said. He glared for a minute upon the costly display on the table, then turned his back on it all, and carried his white face to the window. "My sister shall never marry that scoundrel," he said.
"Daphne's heart will break."
"I know." He looked out on the wintry landscape with gloomy eyes, and a resolutely held underlip. "That is what my mother says. I do not believe it; but if it is so, it does not alter what is the right and only course to take."
"What else does your mother say?"
He moved his shoulders impatiently. "That the wedding must go on; that it is too late to draw back." He turned swiftly upon me. "Could you have believed that my mother, of all people, could take such a view as that?"
"I can see how she feels about it. To break it off now is too hideously painful——"
"And what will it be for Daphne if it goes on? Don't you suppose her life with a brute like that would be hideously painful?" He held the back of his hand to his forehead for a moment and shut his eyes tightly as if in painful thought. "My poor little sister!" he said. "Poor Dapple!"