“Or you would not have come,” she in her turn interrupted him with. “Thank you; you are frank at all events,” she added haughtily.
He turned away. There was perhaps some involuntary suggestion of reproach in his manner, for hers changed.
“No,” she said. “I am very wrong. Please stay for two minutes, and listen to me. I have hoped and prayed that I might never meet you again, but at the same time I made a vow—a real vow,” she went on girlishly, “that if I did so I would swallow my pride, and—and ask you to forgive me. There now—I have said it. That is all. Will you, Mr Norreys?”
He glanced round; the whist party was all unconscious of the rest of the world still—
“Will you not sit down for a moment, Lady Margaret?” he said, and as she did so he too drew a chair nearer to hers. “It is disagreeable to be overheard,” he went on in a tone of half apology. “You ask me what I cannot now do,” he added.
The girl reared her head, and the softness of her manner hardened at once.
“Then,” she said, “we are quits. It does just as well. My conscience is clear now.”
“So is mine, as to that particular of—of what you call forgiving you,” he said, and his voice was a degree less calm. “I cannot do so now, for—I forgave you long, long ago.”
“You have seen Mrs Englewood? She has told you at last that all was explained to me—your sister’s letter and all,” she went on confusedly, “that I saw how horrid, how low and mean and suspicious and everything I had been?”
“I knew all you refer to before I left England,” he said simply. “But I asked Mrs Englewood to leave it as it was, unless she was absolutely forced to tell you. I knew you must hate the sound of my name, and she promised to drop the subject.”