A farm-house cur came barking after the dog-cart just then, and Geoffrey's anger expended itself partly on the dog, instead of being embodied in a reply.
The whip descended so viciously through the air that a more careful person might have seen that the suggestion had not improved his temper.
Except this, he gave no answer. She pressed the subject, although she knew he was angry. "Don't you think, Geoffrey, that that would be a good thing to do? It would quite remove curiosity, and would, in any case, be only fair to me."
Now, if there was one thing Hampstead could not and would not endure, it was to have a woman he amused himself with attempt to put herself on a par with the one he reverenced. Margaret was about all that remained of his conscience. She embodied all the good he knew. Every resolve and hope of his future depended upon her. He could not as yet, he thought, find it possible always to live as she would like; but in a calm way, so controlled as to seem almost dispassionate, he worshiped her, as it were, in the abstract.
His ideas concerning her were so rarefied that, in any other person, he might have called them fanatical. He was bad, but he felt that he would rather hang himself than allow so much as a breath to dim the fair mirror of Margaret's name. At the very mention of her as wearing this brown veil he grew pale with anger, and the barking cur got the benefit of it, and at Nina's insistence his face and eyes grew like steel.
"Heavens above! Can't you let her name alone? Is it not enough for you to raise the devil in me, without scheming to give her trouble? Do you think I will allow her to step in and be blamed for what it was your whim to go in for—risks and all?"
Nina was ready now to let the proposition drop, but she could not refrain from adding: "She would not be blamed for very much if she were blamed for all that has happened between us."
There was truth in what she said, but Geoffrey had looked upon these meetings as anything but innocent. Argument on the point was insufferable, and it only made him lash out worse, as he interrupted her.
"Good God, Nina! you must be mad! Don't you see? Don't you understand?"
Nina waited a second while she thought over what he meant, and her blood seemed to boil as she considered different things.