“How?” said Mr Cheviott, quickly. But there was nothing impertinent in the question—his tone of interest was too genuine.
“How?” repeated Mary; “don’t you see how? If you do not, I am increasingly thankful to be able to tell you how—to show you how horrible it was for me to be forced into such a position. How? Why, of course, by re-entering a house where, only the day before, I had been so so—”
Mr Cheviott looked up, and again Mary saw the dark flush, not often seen there, rise to his forehead.
“So—so what? Do not speak hastily,” he said. “Yet perhaps it is best to know the worst. You are not going to say ‘so insulted’?”
“No,” said Mary, “I was not. So misjudged, I think, was the word on my lips.”
Mr Cheviott smiled—a bitter, sarcastic smile, it seemed to Mary, and perhaps she was right. It roused her to go on.
“I don’t know why I should care—the matter can have less than no interest for you, as little as your opinion of it ought to have for me, and yet I do care—care exceedingly that you, Mr Cheviott, should, know that I was actually forced into going to your house that day—that nothing but the risk of possible disloyalty to others, to another, at least, made me give in to do so. But of course I never dreamed of my going there coming to your knowledge. I may be blunt and plain-spoken, but I am not capable of such coarse, obtrusive defiance as that would have been.”
Mr Cheviott got up from his chair and walked about for a minute or two. “She thinks her position painful,” he said to himself, “and to such a sensitive girl it must be so, I suppose. Nothing that I could say would ever make her believe the light in which what she did really appears to me. And still less can she know how infinitely, unspeakably more painful than hers my position is!” Then he came back to the table, and standing opposite Mary, he said, earnestly:
“I am glad you have told me what you have felt about it,” he said; “but will you believe me, Miss Western, when I tell you that your coming again to Romary never struck me as you think. If I thought about it at all, it was to feel sure that, as you say was the case, you had been forced to come. It was not likely, was it,” he went on, with considerable bitterness in his tone, “that I should imagine you would wish to come in my way after—well, never mind. It is enough for me to say,” his voice resuming its earnest kindliness, “that nothing you could do would ever appear to me ‘coarse, or obtrusive, or defiant,’ or anything but brave and true and womanly.”
Mary was mollified in spite of herself. But her prejudices and prepossessions were far too deep-rooted to have received more than a very passing shake. And alas! in her moment of triumph she forgot to be generous.