His own eyes are dim as he speaks.
"But you know that the world will always say that he was my lover?"
"I do not think that the world will say it—of my wife; but, if it do, I, at least, shall not be troubled."
"You have a great nature," she says, with deep emotion.
Brandolin smiles. "Oh, I cannot claim so much as that; but I have a great love."
"I'm awfully glad that prig's got spun," says George Usk, as Gervase receives a telegram from the Foreign Office which requires his departure from Surrenden at four o'clock that afternoon.
"Spun! What imagination!" says his wife, very angrily. "Who should have spun him, pray will you tell me?"
"We shall never hear it in so many words," says Usk, with a grim complacency, "but I'll swear, if I die for it, that he's asked your Russian friend to marry him and that she's said she won't. Very wise of her, too. Especially if, as you imply, they carried on together years ago: he'd be eternally throwing it in her teeth: he's what the Yanks call a 'tarnation mean cuss.'"
"I never implied anything of the sort," answers the lady of Surrenden, with great decorum and dignity. "I never suppose that all my friends are all they ought to be, whatever yours may leave to be desired. If he were attached long ago to Madame Sabaroff, it is neither your affair nor mine. It may possibly concern Lord Brandolin, if he have the intentions which you attribute to him."