“Shall you join this expedition to Croome to-morrow, Anne?”
Julia and Fanny were thumping over a duet, pedal down, and Anne barely caught the low-spoken words.
“I do not know,” she answered, after a brief pause. “My head aches.”
“I don’t much care about it myself; rather the opposite. I shall certainly not go if you don’t.”
Why! he was speaking to her just as though nothing had occurred! If anything could have added to her sense of shame and misery it was this. It sounded like an insult, arousing all the spirit she possessed; her whole nature rose in rebellion against his line of conduct.
“Why have you been talking to me these many weeks as you have been talking, Mr. Angerstyne?” she asked in her straightforward simplicity, turning her face to his.
“There has been no harm in it,” he answered.
“Harm!” she repeated, from her wrung heart. “Perhaps not to you. There has been at least no good in it.”
“If you only knew what an interval of pleasantness it has been for me, Anne! Almost deluding me into forgetting my odious chains and fetters?”