She looked up steadily into Ailsa's eyes.
"She was only a young girl, Honey-bud—too young to marry anybody, too inexperienced to know her own heart until it was too late.
"And Colonel Arran came; and he was ve'y splendid, and handsome, and impressive in his cold, heavy dignity, and ve'y certain that the child must marry him—so certain that she woke up one day and found that she had done it. And learned that she did not love him.
"There was a boy cousin. He was reckless, I reckon; and she was ve'y unhappy; and one night he found her crying in the garden; and there was a ve'y painful scene, and she let him kiss the hem of her petticoat on his promise to go away fo' ever. And—Colonel Arran caught him on his knees, with the lace to his lips—and the child wife crying. . . . He neither asked nor accepted satisfaction; he threatened the—law! And that settled him with her, I reckon, and she demanded her freedom, and he refused, and she took it.
"Then she did a ve'y childish thing; she married the boy—or supposed she did——"
Celia's violet eyes grew dark with wrath:
"And Colonel Arran went into co't with his lawyers and his witnesses and had the divorce set aside—and publicly made this silly child her lover's mistress, and their child nameless! That was the justice that the law rendered Colonel Arran. And now you know why I hate him—and shall always hate and despise him."
Ailsa's head was all awhirl; lips parted, she stared at Celia in stunned silence, making as yet no effort to reconcile the memory of the man she knew with this cold, merciless, passionless portrait.
Nor did the suspicion occur to her that there could be the slightest connection between her sister-in-law's contempt for Colonel Arran and Berkley's implacable enmity.
All the while, too, her clearer sense of right and justice cried out in dumb protest against the injury done to the man who had been her friend, and her parents' friend—kind, considerate, loyal, impartially just in all his dealings with her and with the world, as far as she had ever known.