"No need for polite fabrications;" he took her up quickly. "You went in. Miss Kresney did not come home. Is this the first time he has trapped you with a convenient lie? Tell me that."
Words and tone roused her to a passing flash of retaliation.
"If you're going to get so angry, Theo, I won't tell you anything, and I won't be questioned like a creature in a witness-box! Some one's been saying horrid things of me. Major Wyndham, I suppose. You wouldn't listen to any one else. It's very mean of him——"
Desmond took a hasty step forward. "How dare you speak so of the straightest man living!" he cried with imperious heat. "You, who have taken advantage of my blindness to deceive me deliberately a second time, on account of a cad who isn't fit to tie your shoe-strings. I've been blind in more than one way lately. But that is over now. I am not likely to repeat the mistake of trusting you implicitly—after this."
She cowered under the lash of his just wrath, hiding her face and crying heart-broken tears—the bitterest she had yet shed. In snatching at the shadow it seemed she had lost the substance past recall.
"Oh! You are cruel—horrible!" she wailed, with her disarming, pathetic air of a scolded child that made a rough word to her seem cowardly as a blow.
"No need to break your heart over it," he said more gently; "and as to cruelty, Evelyn, haven't you abused my faith in your loyalty and dragged my pride in the dust by letting your name be coupled with that man's, though I told you plainly I had good reasons for distrusting and disliking him. I suppose he made a dead set at you while I was away—cowardly brute! But what hits me hardest of all is not your indiscretion; it's your persistent crookedness that poisons everything. It was the same over your bills last year—as I told you then. It's the same now. It's a poor look-out if a man can't trust his own wife; but I suppose you must have lied to me—and to Honor, a dozen times this last week."
It had cost him an effort to speak so plainly and at such length; but his wife's uneven breathing was the only answer he received.
He came closer and laid an arm round her shoulder.