He caught up the phrase with an intonation of acute distress.
“In disgrace? How can you misunderstand me so lamentably as to suggest such an idea?” Then, ruth and pity carrying him, like runaway horses, quite beyond the limits of his self-imposed commission, “Why, I cannot think how my wife will get on without you.”
At that a tiny smile stole to the drooped corners of her sad mouth. “He has always suspected me of telling lies, but my imagination has never run to such a big one as his!” Aloud she said, while the least tinge of malice, which she was unable to get rid of, coloured the plaintive innocence of her speech—
“It is you, then, who have come to the end of your patience! you who, like Tom—Lord Bletchley, I mean—have put down your foot!”
At the pseudo-naïveté of this reproach Mr. Tancred’s pale face grew suddenly suffused with a hot flush, but he looked his interlocutor full in the eyes as he answered with a steady dryness—
“I do not think there is any analogy between the cases.”
The response showed her that he was as perfectly aware as she herself of the reason of her ejectment from the Glanville household; and also that he repudiated any kinship with Tom’s amorous weakness. The—in her experience—unexampled severity of his tone, coupled with the consciousness of having made a deplorably false step, combined to overset her. “It is time to begin to cry,” she said to herself, yielding by policy to what was a very real breakdown of self-control, and at once the obedient tears welled into and blurred the meek lustre of her eyes.
“It is hard that when we are going to part so soon we should keep misunderstanding each other!” she murmured, with just enough and not too much of a sob. “I never dreamed that you would think that I could imply that there was any likeness between such a person as poor Lord Bletchley and—you!”
The little subtle pause before the personal pronoun somehow gave a sense of so enormous a superiority in the person to whom it referred to his unlucky brother-in-law, that Edward felt his temporary anger melting back into the original mass of misery from which it had sprung. How could she tell what a hornet’s sting her perhaps unintended insinuation had gained from that news of Camilla’s, of which she could know nothing? How could she tell that her flippant shaft had struck a heart and conscience already writhing with remorse? In word and deed Edward had been absolutely faithful to his wife. But how about thought? Despite his Pharisaical attitude, was he in reality so very much Tom’s superior?
“You have misunderstood me too,” he said, his voice resuming its courteous gentleness. “No doubt through my fault—my muddled way of explaining a plan which we thought would be for your happiness—give you pleasure!”