"Oh, you are cruel, Geoffrey. I may be a mass of treachery, but not to you—not to you, Geoffrey. Having to put on the veil angered me. I have been wicked. We have both been wicked. But you are so much worse than I am. You know you are!"
As she said this it sounded partly true and partly whimsical, so she tried to smile again. He could not endeavor to resist tears when he knew that he had been unnecessarily harsh, and he was glad of the opportunity to smile also and to smooth things over.
As a tacit confession that he was sorry for his violence, he took the hand that lay beside him into his, and so they drove along toward the city, each extending to the other a good deal of that fellow-feeling which arises from community in guilt. Both felt that in tearing off the mask for a while they had revealed to each other things which, being confessed, left them with hardly a secret on either side, and if this brought them more together, by making them more open with each other, both felt that they now met upon a lower platform.
CHAPTER XVII.
Consider the work of God: for who can make that straight, which he hath made crooked?—Ecclesiastes vii, 13.
A few days after the disturbance in the dog-cart Geoffrey and Maurice Rankin were dining, on a Sunday, with the Mackintoshes. After dinner a walk was proposed, and Margaret went out with them, very spick-and-span and charming in an old black silk "made over," and with a bright bunch of common geraniums at her belt. She had invited the young lawyer partly because he had seemed so distrustful of Geoffrey, and she wished to bring the two more together, so that Maurice might see that he had misjudged him. In the course of their walk Geoffrey asked, for want of something better to say:
"How goes the law, Rankin? Things stirring?"
"Might be worse," replied Maurice. "By the way, Margaret, I forgot to tell you Mr. Bean actually brought in a client the other day."