"Really one might almost suppose you had lowered yourself to some vulgar suspicions——"
They had now arrived by slow degrees, and after various stops and turns to emphasize rhetoric, at a place where the top of the ridge widened, and the path ran between pine-woods clothing the side of the ravine, that here sloped steeply instead of falling perpendicularly.
"You were, at any rate, landed in a most compromising situation," she broke in, recovering her calm, "a nice predicament," she added, stepping from the path into the wood among aromatic undergrowth and tall white heath. "And when that predicament is satisfactorily explained, it will be time——"
"You poor little fool!" he cried, suddenly turning, taking both her hands and looking straight into her eyes, "you must have been off your head——"
"Arthur, how dare you!"
"Regularly off your head to stoop to such miserable suspicions——"
She wrenched her hands away. "I, at least, never spied on you. I had no wish to verify any suspicions—I had seen more than enough," she said scornfully.
"You could have falsified them at once with one question?"
"I—I couldn't—stoop—to that," she wept.
"My child, you must have had hysteria rather badly. I must have been brutally impatient; I was so rushed just then. Poor Miss Scott brought some typing that night and wrote shorthand notes until she was tired out. Then I just happened to ask her a question about a family trouble I knew was worrying her—you remember I engaged her on a family recommendation; her people are old friends of mine—my question was an unlucky one, and the poor girl broke down; she was so thoroughly tired out. You must have chosen that exact moment to open the door——"