"Think so?" he persisted.
"Good gracious, Horry!" my lady retorted, losing patience, "I say I do not know, and you say, 'Think so!' If you want to learn so particularly, ask him yourself. Here he is!"
Mr. Stafford had just entered the room. Perhaps she really wished to satisfy herself as to the state of his feelings. Perhaps she only desired in her irritation to put her cousin in a corner. At any rate she turned to her husband and said, "Here is Horace wishing to know if you mind being turned out?"
Mr. Stafford's face flushed a little at the home-thrust which no one else would have dared to deal. But he showed no displeasure. "Well, not so much as I should have thought," he answered, pausing to weigh a lump of sugar, and, as it seemed, his feelings. "There are compensations, you know."
"Pity all the same--those terms came out," Sir Horace grunted.
"It was."
"Stafford!" Lady Betty asked on a sudden, speaking fast and eagerly, "is it true, I want to ask you, is it true that that led you to resign?"
Naturally he was startled, and he showed that he was. She was the last person who should have put that question to him, but his long training in self-control stood him in good stead.
"Well, yes," he said quietly.
It was better, he thought, indeed it was only right, that she should know what she had done. But he did not look at her.