“I had better go. If you have sent for Mr. Leigh it will be better that I should go.”
Mrs. Leigh was almost incapable of speech. She took Bee by the shoulders and put her back almost violently on the sofa. “You shall stay there,” she said, in a choked and angry voice.
What a horrible pause it was! The girls were silent, looking at each other with wild alarm. Betty, who had blurted out the story, but to whom the idea of repeating it before Aubrey—before a man—was unspeakable horror, made a step towards the door. Then she said, “No, I will not run away,” with tremendous courage. “It is not our fault,” she added, after a pause. “Bee, if I have got to say it again, give me your hand.”
“It is I who ought to say it,” said Bee, pale with the horror of what was to come. “Vulgar vice!” And she to accuse him, and to stand up before the world and say that was why!
It seemed a long time, but it was really only a few minutes, before Aubrey appeared. He came in quickly, breathless with haste and suspense. He expected, from what his mother had told him, to find Miss Lance and Colonel Kingsward there. He came into the agitated room and found, of all people in the world, Bee and Betty, terrified, and his mother, walking about the room sounding, as it were, a metaphorical lash about their ears, in the frank passion of an elder woman who has the most just cause of offence and no reason to bate her breath. There was something humorous in the tragic situation, but to them it was wholly tragic, and Aubrey, seeing for the first time after so long an interval the girl he loved, and seeing her in such strange circumstances, was by no means disposed to see any humorous side.
“Here, Aubrey!” said his mother, “I have called upon you to hear what you are accused of. You thought it was Laura Lance, but she has nothing to do with it. You are accused of travelling from Germany, that time when you were sent off from Cologne—the time those Kingswards turned upon you”—(the girls both started, and recovered themselves a little at the shock of this contemptuous description),—“travelling in sleeping carriages and I know not what with a woman and children, who were believed to belong to you! What have you to say?”
“That was not what I said, Mrs. Leigh.”
“What have you to say?” cried Mrs. Leigh, waving her hand to silence Betty; “the accused has surely the right to speak first.”
“What have I to say? But to what, mother? What is it? Was I travelling with a woman and children? I suppose I was travelling—with all the women and children that were in the same train. But otherwise, of course you know I was with nobody. What does it mean?”
Bee got up from the sofa like a ghost, her blue eyes wild, her face pale. “Oh, let us go, let us go! Do not torment us,” she said. “I will acknowledge that it was not true. Now that I see him I am sure that it was not true. I was mad. I was so stung to think—— Mrs. Leigh, do not kill me! I did him no harm; do not, do not go over it any more!”