If she had wished to heighten the effect of her reception by these small discourtesies she did not succeed. Rather, Marcella's self-possession returned under them. She looked round simply for a chair, brought one forward within speaking distance of her companion, moving once more, in her thin, tall grace, with all that unconscious dignity Letty had so often envied and admired from a distance.
But neither dignity nor grace made any bar to the emotion that filled her. She bent forward, clasping her hands on her knee.
"Your letter to my husband made me so unhappy—that I could not help coming," she said, in a tone that was all entreaty, all humbleness. "Not—of course—that it seemed to either of us a true or just account of what had happened"—she drew herself up gently—"but it made me realise—though indeed I had realised it before I read it—that in my friendship with your husband I had been forgetting—forgetting those things—one ought to remember most. You will let me put things, won't you, in my own way, as they seem to me? At Castle Luton Sir George attracted me very much. The pleasure of talking to him there first made me wish to try and alter some of his views—to bring him across my poor people—to introduce him to our friends. Then, somehow, a special bond grew up between him and me with regard to this particular struggle in which my husband and I"—she dropped her eyes that she might not see Letty's heated face—"have been so keenly interested. But what I ought to have felt—from the very first—was, that there could be, there ought to have been, something else added. Married people "—she spoke hurriedly, her breath rising and falling—"are not two, but one—and my first step should have been to come—and—and ask you to let me know you too—to find out what your feelings were, whether you wished for a friendship—that—that I had perhaps no right to offer to Sir George alone. I have been looking into my own heart"—her voice trembled again—"and I see that fault, that great fault. To be excluded myself from any strong friendship my husband might make, would be agony to me!" The frank, sudden passion of her lifted eyes sent a thrill even through Letty's fierce and hardly, kept silence. "And that I wanted to say to you, first of all. I wronged my own conception of what marriage should be, and you were quite, quite right to be angry!"
"Well, I think it's quite clear, isn't it, that you forgot from the beginning George had a wife?" cried Letty, in her most insulting voice. "That certainly can't be denied. Anybody could see that at Castle Luton!"
Marcella looked at her in perplexity. What could suggest to her how to say the right word, touch the right chord? Would she be able to do more than satisfy her own conscience and then go, leaving this strange little fury to make what use she pleased of her visit and her avowals?
She shaded her eyes with her hand a moment, thinking. Then she said:
"Perhaps it is of no use for me to ask you to remember how full our minds—my husband's and mine—have been of one subject—one set of ideas. But, if I am not keeping you too long, I should like to give you an account, from my point of view, of the friendship between Sir George and myself. I think I can remember every talk of ours, from our first meeting in the hospital down to—down to this morning."
"This morning!" cried Letty, springing up. "This morning! He went to you to-day?"
The little face convulsed with passion raised an intolerable distress in Marcella.
"Yes, he came to see me," she said, her dark eyes, full of pain, full, too, once more, of entreaty, fixed upon her interrogator. "But do let me tell you! I never saw anyone in deeper trouble—trouble about you—trouble about himself."