“You will soon get reconciled to your burden, madam,” he said, with a slight and bitter smile. “Do not fear. The world will help you to get rid of it. Allow me once more to thank you for your promise of silence. I am conscious that both I and she are unworthy of your clemency.”
Katherine’s soul shrank within her. She felt all the recoil, the embarrassment, the revulsion of feeling of a reserved nature, which has unbent and revealed itself, and finds its expansion unresponded to and misunderstood. She felt that he did not believe in what she had said in the least.
“You have not heard your sister’s defence,” she said, after a pause.
“My sister’s fables? I do not want to hear them. Her signature speaks for her. Besides, I can have the whole facts of the transaction from the jeweler. No ingenuity of hers can ever explain them away.”
“You are very harsh.”
“I am far from harsh. And of my harshness or my mildness you cannot be the judge.”
“Why not?”
“Because you are the daughter of a man who knew nothing of honor, or of its exactions, and that instinct is not acquired in a single generation.”
“Have twenty-three generations of nobility bequeathed it to your sister?” was the retort which sprang to her lips, but she generously and valorously kept it unspoken.
Her white skin flushed hotly and painfully at the insult, which was to her what a blow would have been to a man.