“Because you’re a—”
She stopped him before he could say the irrevocable word.
“Because I mean to have the same liberty as the man I’ve married,” she said. “I asked Leo Ulford here, and I intended you should find him here.”
“You didn’t. You thought I wasn’t comin’ home.”
“Why should I have thought such a thing?” she said, swiftly, sharply.
Her voice had an edge to it.
“You meant not to come home, then?”
She read his stupidity at a glance, the guilty mind that had blundered, thinking its intention known when it was not known. He began to deny it, but she stopped him. At this moment, and exactly when she ought surely to have been crushed by the weight of Fritz’s fury, she dominated him. Afterwards she wondered at herself, but not now.
“You meant not to come home?”
For once Lord Holme showed a certain adroitness. Instead of replying to his wife he retorted: