"Who refused to take me abroad for my health when I needed it, and then followed me secretly in disguise to spy out and magnify every mistake I might make? Who employed spies about me to report and distort every incident of my life here? Who had grown so cold and cruel and faithless to me at home that it was no home any more, and I felt I could endure it no longer? Who was too busy and too poor to send his wife to the South after illness, when he had just made a great success and was planning a tour of his own to the very place he actually followed her to, disguised as a spy? Who kept all his good fortune from his wife's knowledge?" A faint sob, disguised as a cough, interrupted this interrogatory.
"Good Heavens! Ermengarde," cried Arthur, the expression of whose face had undergone a variety of changes, mostly merging into one of stupefaction, during this address, "what can you mean? What can you have taken into your head? What on earth do you mean by faithless?"
"What," she cried, losing her head suddenly, and throwing prudence and pride to the winds, though still adhering to the Socratic method—"what did you mean by that scene in your study, the night I came home early with a headache from my mother's, and looked in?"
"Scene in my study? There was never any scene in my study. What night are you talking of? Look into my study whenever you like, and you'll see nothing there but a man working or smoking, or both."
At this the Socratic method went by the board as well as pride and prudence.
"The night—after—after—you had been so unkik-kik-kind about my ha-ha-hats and gug-gug-gug-going abroad," she gasped, "the night the—the woman was there—cry-crying—and being com-com-comforted?"
"Woman crying?" he muttered, puzzled. "Women don't come and cry in my study. What on earth have you been imagining? Women don't come—except, of course, the secretary—at all. You can't mean Miss Scott? By George, now I come to think of it, she did come and cry there once, poor girl. And of course, I tried to comfort her."
"Oh, of course!"
"Ermengarde! How can you?"
"How coo-coo-coo-could you?"