"You'll pay dearly for it if you do." She stopped a minute, then she lowered her voice, but she was becoming excited; after all, there was some interest left in the situation, and she offered up her child's dignity to its dramatic possibility. "There was something more in the telegram than I have told you," she said. "You are killing Lena, and not behaving as an honorable gentleman."
"What do you mean?" he asked, bewildered, but remembering uncomfortably Lena's manner of yesterday.
"I mean," said Mrs. Lakeman, indignantly—for it was a theory of hers that a claim was always stronger than a plea, and gained more consideration—"that you have no right to marry Margaret Vincent, or anybody else. I mean that you have made my child love you, that you are all the world to her, and you made her believe that she was all the world to you."
"We have never been anything but friends!" He was aghast.
"Outwardly. At heart you have been lovers, and you can't deny it. She has given you the one love of her life, dear"—Mrs. Lakeman was becoming sentimental—"and I never dreamed that you had not given her yours. You can go back to Margaret Vincent, if you like, but you have killed my child—my one, only child. You must see how ill she looks, how changed she is."
"But this is ghastly," he said; "I'm not a bit in love with Lena. I never cared for any one in that way but Margaret, and I want to marry her."
"Go and marry her," Mrs. Lakeman answered, in a low voice; "Lena will not be alive to see it. Do you suppose that I would give away my own child's secret, or bring myself to speak to you as I'm doing now, if it were not a case of life and death?" She said the last words with a thrill.
He looked at her in despair.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, after a pause.