"There!" she said, "now we must not talk any more about it. I am glad I told you. It was a comfort. And somehow—I don't mean to be unkind; but I couldn't have told you in the old days—it's wonderful how much better I like you now than I used to do, though perhaps we don't agree much better."
Both laughed, though the eyes of both were full of tears.
* * * * *
Presently they were in the village together. As they neared the Hurds' old cottage, which was now empty and to be pulled down, a sudden look of disgust crossed Marcella's face.
"Did I tell you my news of Minta Hurd?" she said.
No; Mary had heard nothing. So Marcella told the grotesque and ugly news, as it seemed to her, which had reached her at Amalfi. Jim Hurd's widow was to be married again, to the queer lanky "professor of elocution," with the Italian name and shifty eye, who lodged on the floor beneath her in Brown's Buildings, and had been wont to come in of an evening and play comic songs to her and the children. Marcella was vehemently sure that he was a charlatan—that he got his living by a number of small dishonesties, that he had scented Minta's pension. But apart from the question whether he would make Minta a decent husband, or live upon her and beat her, was the fact itself of her re-marriage, in itself hideous to the girl.
"Marry him!" she said. "Marry any one! Isn't it incredible?"
They were in front of the cottage. Marcella paused a moment and looked at it. She saw again in sharp vision the miserable woman fainting on the settle, the dwarf sitting, handcuffed, under the eye of his captors; she felt again the rush of that whirlwind of agony through which she had borne the wife's helpless soul in that awful dawn.
And after that—exit!—with her "professor of elocution." It made the girl sick to think of. And Mary, out of a Puseyite dislike of second marriage, felt and expressed much the same repulsion.
Well—Minta Hurd was far away, and if she had been there to defend herself her powers of expression would have been no match for theirs. Nor does youth understand such pleas as she might have urged.