“Why didn’t you go? What kept you?”
“I felt that I must ask you something.”
He sat down beside her and took both her hands roughly. They were dry and burning as if with fever.
“You trick Jimmy,” he said. “You trick the Ingletons, Vane, all the people here—”
“Trick!” she interrupted coldly, almost disdainfully. “What do you mean?”
“That you deceive them, take them in.”
“What about?”
“You know quite well.”
After a pause, which was perhaps—he could not tell—a pause of astonishment, she said:
“Do you really expect me to go about telling every one that I, a lonely woman, separated from my husband, unable to marry again, have met a man whom I care for, and that I’ve been weak enough—or wicked enough, if you like—to let him know it?”