“No, no, Dicky is impossible. She wouldn’t give it away, but she would want me to fight it out with Evan. But I can’t, Father,—I can’t, I can’t. He has broken my nerve. I would fight for myself, but I can’t risk it when it is for Ivor. I can’t afford to lose. It is Evan’s own fault. I never thought of being deceitful until I met him.”
“And Mrs. Vachell?” added Cyril.
“I daresay,” she admitted, “but she doesn’t want to any more than I do. She says she does so look forward to the day when women won’t have to lie. It will be such a luxury.”
“H’m, yes, perhaps,” he replied, “but we won’t go into these gilded prospects now. She’s evidently still in a very poor way. But if you don’t mind me telling you, I think what you are doing is very risky, though I don’t exactly know what it is. How are you going to get off?”
“Just slip off the boat while Mrs. Vachell is saying good-bye to him. He is to suppose that I am in the ladies’ cabin looking after someone who is ill.”
“And do you suppose any man is going to find out that his wife has played him a trick like that and yet go on with his voyage and stay over there?”
“Mrs. Vachell said he wouldn’t be able to afford to come back,” said Evangeline.
“Good God! What a fool the woman is,” he exclaimed. “And she and her pack of jelly-brained idiots think that—well, well, Chips my dear, she is not too big a fool anyhow to have properly done poor old Evan. She must have endured the devil of a lot of self-denial in the way of truth lately. A regular Lent of corkers. Chips, I really don’t advise you to go on with this. It is all nonsense; Evan is a very decent sort of fellow and I don’t suppose he understands in the least that he is worrying you seriously. I’ll tell him that I am going to keep you here for a bit, and Ivor too, to keep you company, and that we’ll think out a scheme later for you to go out there when he has got ready for you. He can’t object, for I don’t think you are well.”
“No, I am not,” said Evangeline, and she burst into tears. “I am going to have another, and I know he will take it away, too, and I shall go mad——”
“Oh, rot!” said Cyril kindly. “Here, buck up. You’re not going if you don’t want to. Why on earth didn’t you talk over this mess before? There——” (the front door bell rang) “that’s probably the heavy father coming on the stage now.”