"Many people have done such things. I know they have. Why—why, it was only meant—as a skit—to make people laugh! There's no harm in it, William."
Ashe, without speaking, took up the book and looked back at certain pages, which he seemed to have marked. Kitty's feeling as she watched him was the feeling of the condemned culprit, held dumb and strangled in the grip of his own sense of justice, and yet passionately conscious how much more he could say for himself than anybody is ever likely to say for him.
"When did you have the first idea of this book, Kitty?"
"About a year ago," she said, in a low voice.
"In October? At Haggart?"
Kitty nodded.
Ashe thought. Her admission took him back to the autumn weeks at Haggart, after the Cliffe crisis and the rearrangement of the ministry in the July of that year. He well remembered that those weeks had been weeks of special happiness for both of them. Afterwards, the winter had brought many renewed qualms and vexations. But in that period, between the storms of the session and Kitty's escapades in the hunting-field, memory recalled a tender, melting time—a time rich in hidden and exquisite hours, when with Kitty on his breast, lip to lip and heart to heart, he had reaped, as it seemed to him, the fruits of that indulgence which, as he knew, his mother scorned. And at that very moment, behind his back, out of his sight, she had begun this atrocious thing.
He looked at her again—the bitterness almost at his lips, almost beyond his control.
"I wish I knew what could have been your possible object in writing it?"
She sat up and confronted him. The color flamed back again into her pale cheeks.