"'Tis my anger—"
"There's an anger of innocence, and an anger of guilt. I would your anger had shown more of contempt than of confusion." Alas! he knew naught of half-guilt and its manifestations.
"How can you talk so?—I won't listen—such insulting innuendoes!—even if you are my father—why, this knave himself says I betrayed Captain Falconer's scheme: how could he think that, if—"
"That proves nothing," said Ned, with a contemptuous grin. "Women do unaccountable things. A streak of repentance, maybe; or a lovers' quarrel. The point is, a woman like you wouldn't have entered into a scheme like that, with a man like him, if there hadn't already been a pretty close understanding of another kind. Oh, I know your whole damn' sex, begad!—no offence to these other ladies."
"William, this is scandalous!" cried Mrs. Faringfield. My mother, too, looked what it was not her place to speak. As for Tom and me, we had to defer to Mr. Faringfield; and so had Cornelius, who was very solemn, with an uneasy frown between his white eyebrows. Poor Fanny, most sensitive to disagreeable scenes, sat in self-effacement and mute distress.
Mr. Faringfield, not replying to his wife, took a turn up and down the room, apparently in great mental perplexity and dismay.
Suddenly he was a transformed man. Pale with wrath, his lips moving spasmodically, his arms trembling, he turned upon Margaret, grasped her by the shoulders, and in a choked, half-articulate voice demanded:
"Tell the truth! Is it so—this shame—crime? Speak! I will shake the truth from you!"
"Father! Don't!" she screamed, terrified by his look; and from his searching gaze, she essayed to hide, by covering her face with her hands, the secret her conscience magnified so as to forbid confession and denial alike. I am glad to recall this act of womanhood, which showed her inability to brazen all accusation out.
But Mr. Faringfield saw no palliating circumstance in this evidence of womanly feeling. Seeing in it only an admission of guilt, he raised his arms convulsively for a moment as if he would strike her down with his hands, or crush her throat with them. But, overcoming this impulse, he drew back so as to be out of reach of her, and said, in a low voice shaken with passion: