Then she turned—there was a burning spot of red on each cheek, her eyes were flaming. Yet her voice was low and quiet.
“Hard on you!” she repeated. “I am too sorry for myself to think or care much about you. I am—yes, I may own it, I am so horribly disappointed. I had really allowed myself to think of you as sincere, as, in spite of your unmanly affectations, your contemptible conceit, an honest man, a possible friend I was beginning to forgive your ill-bred insolence to me as a stranger at the first, thinking there was something worthy of respect about you after all. But—oh, dear! And to try to humbug me by this sham honesty—to dare to say you did not think you could have cared for me enough to risk curtailing your own self-indulgences, but that now—it is too pitiful. But, oh, dear—it is too horribly disappointing!”
And as she looked at him again, he saw that her eyes were actually full of tears.
His brain was in a whirl of bewilderment, bitterest mortification and indignation. For the moment the last had the best of it.
“You have a right to refuse me, to despise my weakness if you choose—whether it is generous to take advantage of my misplaced confidence in you in having told you all—yes, all, is another matter. But one thing you shall not accuse me of, and that is, of lying to you. I have not said one untruthful word. I did—yes, I did love you, Mary Ford—what I feel to you now is something more like—”
He hesitated.
“Hate, I suppose,” she suggested mockingly. “All the better. It cannot be a pleasant feeling to hate any one, and I do not wish you anything pleasant. If I could believe,” she went on slowly, “if I could believe you had loved me, I think I should be glad, for it would be what you deserve. I would have liked to make you love me from that very first evening if I could—just to but unluckily I am not the sort of woman to succeed in anything of that kind. However—”
She stopped; steps approaching them were heard through the stillness. Maisie turned. “I have nothing more to say, and I do not suppose you wish to continue this conversation. Good-bye, Mr Norreys.”
And almost before he knew she had gone, she had quite disappeared.
Despard was a strong man, but for a moment or two he really thought he was going to faint. He had grown deathly white while Maisie’s hard, bitter words rained down upon him like hailstones; now that she had left him he grew so giddy that, had he not suddenly caught hold of a tree, he would have fallen.