"If I wrote and told him it was all my doing, William?—if I grovelled to him?"
"The responsibility is mine," he said, sternly. "I had no business to tell even you the things printed there. I told them at my own risk. If anything I say has any weight with you, Kitty, you will write nothing."
She spread out her hands to the fire again, and he heard her say, as though to herself:
"The thing is—the awful thing is, that I'm mad—I must be mad. I never thought of all this when I was writing it. I wrote it in a kind of dream. In the first place, I wanted to glorify you—"
He broke into an exclamation.
"Your taste, Kitty!—where was your taste? That a wife should praise a husband in public! You could only make us both laughing-stocks."
His handsome features quivered a little. He felt this part of it the most galling, the most humiliating of all; and she understood. In his eyes she had shown herself not only reckless and treacherous, but indelicate, vulgar, capable of besmirching the most sacred and intimate of relations.
She rose from her seat.
"I must go and take my things off," she said, in "a vague voice," and as she moved she tottered a little. He turned to look at her. Amid his own crushing sense of defeat and catastrophe, his natural and righteous indignation, he remembered that she had been ill—he remembered their child. But whether from the excitement, first of the meeting in the Vercelli palace, and now of this scene—or merely from the heat of the fire over which she had been hanging, her cheeks were flushed, her eyes blazed. Her beauty had never been more evident; but it made little appeal to him; it was the wild, ungovernable beauty from which he had suffered. He saw that she was excited, but there was an air also of returning physical vigor; and the nascent feeling which might have been strengthened by pallor and prostration died away.
Kitty moved as though to pass him and go to her room, which opened out of the salon. But as she neared him she suddenly caught him by the arm.