“It’s absurd of you to talk like this,” she said. “Mr. Mellowes is the last man on earth I should ever have looked at, even supposing Raymond....” She had spoken the name before she was aware of it; in her momentary flash of temper the secret she had so carefully guarded escaped her.
It was too late to attempt to cover what she had said; she knew by the sudden expression of June’s face that she had heard.
There was a poignant silence, then June sat up with a little jerk.
“Of course, that’s let the cat out of the bag,” she said curtly. “And you let me run him down! How mean, how unutterably mean of you, Esther!... I can’t think now why I never guessed! Raymond Ashton!”
Esther had flushed scarlet.
“I never said that was his name,” she tried to defend herself. “It’s purely your imagination. And even supposing it is, do you think I mind what you say about him, or Mr. Mellowes either? Neither of you know him as I do, or you would never say such cruel, wicked things.” She stopped with a sob in her voice.
“Then it is Raymond Ashton?” June said gently. She got up and came over to where Esther was sitting. “Oh, I am sorry I said anything about him!” she cried impulsively. “You ought to have stopped me. How on earth was I to know?”
“I don’t care what you said; it’s all untrue,” Esther protested stormily. “Nothing you could ever say about him would influence me or make me feel any differently.”
June got up for a cigarette; when she was nonplussed 159 she invariably had to smoke; she took several agitated puffs before she looked at her friend again.
“Well, anything I said was in absolute innocence, you know that,” she said in distress. “I’d no more idea than the dead that you and he.... So that’s why he doesn’t want you to go to his mother?”