Frank looked at her sombrely—a queer mixture of expressions on the face, in which the maturer man was already to be discerned at war with the powerful young animal.
"I suppose you mean Lord Maxwell?"
There was a pause.
"You may take what I said," she said at last, looking into the fire, "as meaning anybody who pays honestly with work and brains for what society has given him—as far as he can pay, at any rate."
"Now look here," said Frank, coming dolefully to sit down beside her; "don't slate me any more. I'm a bad lot, I know—well, an idle lot—I don't think I am a bad lot—But it's no good your preaching to me while Betty's sticking pins into me like this. Now just let me tell you how she's been behaving."
Marcella succumbed, and heard him. He glanced at her surreptitiously from time to time, but he could make nothing of her. She sat very quiet while he described the constant companionship between Aldous and Betty, and the evident designs of Miss Raeburn. Just as when he made his first confidences to her in London, he was vaguely conscious that he was doing a not very gentlemanly thing. But again, he was too unhappy to restrain himself, and he longed somehow to make an ally of her.
"Well, I have only one thing to say," she said at last, with an odd nervous impatience—"go and ask her, and have done with it! She might have some respect for you then. No, I won't help you; but if you don't succeed, I'll pity you—I promise you that. And now you must go away."
He went, feeling himself hardly treated, yet conscious nevertheless of a certain stirring of the moral waters which had both stimulus and balm in it.
She, left behind, sat quiet in the old library for a few lonely minutes. The boy's plight made her alternately scornful and repentant of her sharpness to him. As to his report, one moment it plunged her in an anguish she dared not fathom; the next she was incredulous—could not simply make herself take the thing as real.
But one thing had been real—that word from Aldous to her of "marriage"! The nostril dilated, the breast heaved, as she lost all thought of Frank in a resentful passion that could neither justify nor calm itself. It seemed still as though he had struck her. Yet she knew well that she had nothing to forgive.