She did not dare to look at him as she spoke. Her heart was beating furiously; there was a little hammering pulse in her throat that almost choked her. Then Chris covered the distance between them in a single stride and took her roughly by the shoulders.
"How dare you—how dare you say such a thing to me?" he said hoarsely. "Good God! don't you think I've got any—any feeling? Do you think I'm such a blackguard as to—to listen to such a thing for one moment? You must be mad!"
"I'm not—and you know I'm not. I'm tired—sick to death of living like this." Her voice rose excitedly. "Why, we may have to be together for years and years—twenty years, if we don't try and get free!" Her brown eyes were feverish. "You hate it as much as I do. Oh, surely it can be arranged if we try very hard!"
Chris was as white as death. This was the worst shock he had ever had in his life, and, coming from Marie Celeste of all people, it left him stunned and speechless.
Until his return from Scotland he had been quite happy and 211 contented, but since that first evening when she had so coldly repulsed him there had been a restlessness in his heart, a miserable sort of feeling that he could settle to nothing—a consciousness that things were all wrong and that he had not the power to put them right.
And the discovery that he had only himself to thank for it all did not help him in the least. In his blindness he tried every way but the right way to get back to his old contentment.
Marie was in love with love, not with Feathers, but, being a man, Chris could not tell this. He only saw the thing that lay immediately beneath his notice, and it told him that his wife had given her love to his friend.
He had no more idea than the dead what was going to happen, but, with his bulldog obstinacy, he knew he had no intention of allowing her to go free.
He cared nothing for scandal, though he pretended to. He hardly considered Feathers at all in the case. The one thing that racked him was the knowledge that he was in danger of losing something that had all at once become very precious.
His lips twitched badly when he tried to speak. He felt as if he were fighting in the dark—as if there were some unseen foe pitting its strength against him that would not come out into honest daylight.