"I don't know what you would be at," Lady Betty muttered, looking more and more frightened.
"No? That's what I'm going to explain--if you'll sit, miss? Sit, girl!"
Lady Betty shrugged her shoulders, but obeyed, an uneasy look in her eyes. Sophia sat also, on the farther side of the small oak table; but for a full minute she did not speak. When she did her voice had lost its bitterness, and was low and absent and passionless. "There are two things to be talked about--you and I," she said, drumming slowly on the table with her fingers. "And by your leave I'll speak of myself first. If I could set him free I would! D'you hear me? D'you understand? If the worst that could have befallen me in Clarges Row, the worst that he had in his mind when he married me, were the price to be paid, I would pay it to-day. He should be free to marry whom he would; and if by raising my hand I could come between him and her I would not! Nay, if by raising my hand I could bring them together I would! And that though when he married me, he did me as great a wrong as a man can do a woman!"
Suddenly, without warning, Lady Betty burst into irrepressible sobbing. "Oh," she cried, "do you hate him so!"
"Hate him?" Sophia answered. "Hate him? No, fool, I love him so!" And then in a strain of bitterness, the more intense as she spoke in a tone little above a whisper. "You start, miss? You think me a fool, I know, to tell you that! But see how proud I am! I will not keep from the woman he loves the least bit of her triumph! Let her enjoy it--though 'tis an empty one--for I cannot free him, do what I will! Let her know, for her pleasure, that she is fairer than I, as I know it! Let her know that she has won the heart that should be mine, and--which will be sweetest of all to her--that I would fain have won it myself and could not! Let her but you are crying, miss? And I'd forgotten. What's all this to you?" with a change to quiet irony. "You are too young to understand such things! And, of course, 'twas not of this that I wished to speak to you; but of yourself, and of--Tom. Of course--Tom," with a faint laugh. "I'm sorry that he misbehaved to you in the park. I've had it on my mind ever since. There's but one thing to be done, I am sure, and that is what your own judgment, Lady Betty----"
"Sophy!"
But Sophia continued without heeding the remonstrance--"pointed out to you! I mean, to return to your mother without loss of time. It is best for you, and best for--Tom," with a crooked smile. "Best, indeed, for all of us."
Lady Betty, her face held aloof, was busy drying her tears; her position such that it was not possible to say what her sentiments were, nor whether her emotion was real or assumed. But at that she looked up, startled; she met the other's eyes. "Do you mean," she muttered, "that I am to go home?"
"To be sure," Sophia answered coldly. "'Tis only what you wished yourself, three days ago."
"But--but Sir Tom hasn't--hasn't troubled me again," Betty faltered.