“As you will,” replied the curate recklessly.
“Well, I do will,” Lindo rejoined, with some hauteur. And he looked, still standing erect and expectant, as if he thought that Clode could not do otherwise than take his leave.
But that was just what the curate had not the slightest intention of doing. Instead, with a cynical smile, he coolly sat himself down again. His superior’s eyes flashed with redoubled anger at this, which seemed to him, after what had passed, the grossest impertinence; but Mr. Clode in his present mood cared nothing for that, and made it very plain that he did not. “Will you think me exacting if I ask for another cup of tea, Miss Hammond?” he said quietly.
That was enough to make the rector’s cup run over. He did not wait to hear Laura’s answer, but himself said. “Perhaps I had better say good evening, Miss Hammond.”
“You will not forget the bazaar?” she answered, making no demur, but at once holding out her hand.
There was a faint note of appeal in her voice which begged him not to be angry, and yet he was angry. “The bazaar?” he said coldly. “Oh, yes, I will not forget it.”
And with that he took up his hat and went, feeling much as a man does who, walking along a well-known road, has put his foot into a hole and fallen heavily. He was almost more astonished and aggrieved than hurt.
When he was gone there was silence in the room. I do not know whether Laura had been conscious, while the two men wrangled before her, that she was the prize of the strife, and so, like the maidens of old, had been content to stand by passive and expectant, satisfied to see the best man win, or whether she had been too much alarmed to interpose. But certain it is that, when she was left alone with the curate, she felt almost as uncomfortable as she had ever felt in her life. She tried to say something indifferent, but for once she was too nervous to frame the words. And Mr. Clode, instead of assisting her, instead of bridging over the awkwardness of the moment, as he should have done, since he was the person to blame for it all, sat silent and morose, brooding over the fire and sipping his tea. At last he spoke. “Well,” he said abruptly, turning his dark eyes suddenly on hers. “Which is it to be, Laura?”
He had never spoken to her in that tone before, and had any one told her that morning that she would submit to it, she would have laughed her informant to scorn. But there was a new-born masterfulness in the curate’s manner which cowed her. “I do not know what you mean,” she murmured, her face hot, her heart beating.
“I think you do,” he answered sternly, without removing his eyes from her. “Is it to be the rector, or is it to be me, Laura? You must choose between us.”