“I,” he said, coldly interrupting her, “was willing to advise you. But you took your own path. You know that.”
“I know,” she retorted with sudden passion, “that you were willing to insult me! That you were willing to set me, because I had committed an act of folly, as low as the lowest! So low that all men were the same to me! So low that I might be handed like a carter’s daughter who had misbehaved herself, to the first man who was willing to cover her disgrace. That! that was your way of helping me and advising me!”
“In two minutes,” he said in measured accents, “the time will be up!”
He appeared to be quite unmoved by her reproaches. His manner was as cold, as repellant, as harsh as ever. But he was not so entirely untouched by her appeal as he wished her to think. For the time, indeed, his heart was numbed by anxiety, his breast was rendered insensible by the grip of suspense. But the barbed arrows of her reproaches stuck and remained. And presently the wounds would smart and rankle, troubling his conscience, if not his heart. It is possible that he had already a suspicion of this. If so, it only deepened his rage and his hostility.
With the same pitiless composure, he repeated:
“In two minutes. There is still time, but no more than time.”
“You have told me that you do not wish to hear my reasons?”
“For silence? I do not.”
“They will not turn you,” her voice shook under the maddening sense of his injustice, “whatever they are?”
“No,” he answered, “they will not. And having said that I have said all that I propose to say.”