“Was that Nelly Winterbourn I saw driving away from the door? I thought it was Nelly. And when he is dying, with not many hours to live——!”
“And why should not she come to mamma?” said Frances. “She has no mother of her own.”
“Ah,” said Ramsay, looking at her keenly, “I see what you mean. She has no mother of her own; and therefore she comes to Markham’s, which is next best.”
“I said, to my mother,” said Frances, indignantly. “I don’t see what Markham has to do with it.”
“All the same, I shouldn’t like my wife to be about the streets, going to—any one’s mother, when I was dying.”
“It would be right enough,” cried Frances, hot and indignant, “if you had married a woman who did not care for you.” She forgot, in the heat of her partisanship, that she was admitting too much. But Claude did not remember, any more than she.
“Oh, come,” he said, “Miss Waring, Frances. (May I call you Frances? It seems unnatural to call you Miss Waring, for, though I only saw you for the first time a little while ago, I have known you all your life.) Do you think it’s quite fair to compare me to Winterbourn? He was fifty when he married Nelly, a fellow quite used up. At all events, I am young, and never was fast; and I don’t see,” he added, pathetically, “why a woman shouldn’t be able to care for me.”
“Oh, I did not mean that,” cried Frances, with penitence; “I only meant——”
“And you shouldn’t,” said Claude, shaking his head, “pay so much attention to what Nelly says. She makes herself out a martyr now; but she was quite willing to marry Winterbourn. She was quite pleased. It was a great match; and now she is going to get the good of it.”
“If being very unhappy is getting the good of it——!”