“No.”
“Just so,” he replied dryly. “Well, if you had, you would know that brawls of this kind are common things, the commonest of things at such a time, and that sensible people turn their backs on them. You’ve chosen to turn the farce into a tragedy, and in doing so you’ve made yourself ridiculous—and me too!”
“If you had seen them,” she said, “I do not think you would speak as you are speaking.”
“My dear girl,” he replied, and shrugged his shoulders, “I have seen many such things, many. But there is one thing I have never seen, and that is a man killed in an election squabble! The whole thing is childish—silly! The least knowledge of the world—”
“Would have saved me from it?”
“Exactly! Would have saved you from it!” he answered austerely. “And me from a very annoying incident! Peers have nothing to do with elections, as you ought to know; and to bring this mob of all sorts to my door as if the matter touched me, is to compromise me. It is past a joke!”
Mary stared. She was trying to place herself. Certainly this was the room in which she had taken tea, and this was the man who had welcomed her, who had hung over her, whose eyes had paid her homage, who had foreseen her least want, who had lapped her in observance. This was the man and this the room, and there was the chair in which good Mrs. Wilkinson had sat and beamed on her.
But there was a change somewhere; and the change was in the man. Could it mean that he, too, had made a mistake and now recognized it? That he, too, had found that he did not love? But in that case this was not the way to confess an error. His tone, his manner, which held no respect for the woman and no softness for the sweetheart, were far from the tone of one in the wrong. On the contrary, they presented a side of him which had been hitherto hidden from her; a phase of the strength that she had admired, which shocked her even while, as deep calls to deep, it roused her pride. She remembered that she was his betrothed, and that he had wooed her, he had chosen her. And on slight provocation he spoke to her in this strain!
She sought the clue, she fancied that she held it, and from this moment she was on her guard. She was quiet, but there was a smouldering fire in her eyes. “Perhaps I was wrong,” she said. “I have had little experience of these things. But are not you, on your side, making too much of this? Too much of a very small, a very natural mistake? Isn’t it a trifle after all?”
“Not so much of a trifle as you think!” he retorted. “A man in my position has to follow a certain line of conduct. A girl in yours should be careful to guide herself by my views. Instead, out of a foolish sentimentality, you run directly counter to them! It is too late to consider your relation to me when the harm is done, my dear.”