“To me! Mr. Rivers! What possible authority——”
Egidia rose to her feet, and Mrs. Elles perforce rose too.
“Have I done such a mischief?” she asked supplicatingly. “Stay! the lace of my dress has got caught in yours!”
She disentangled it, while Egidia stood, a prisoner, shivering with impatience, and some disgust.
“Surely,” Phœbe Elles went on, “you are very fond of each other? I always thought so, from the way he spoke—or rather did not speak of you. With some men reticence about a woman is the sure sign of their feeling keenly about her. Indeed, I was quite jealous of you sometimes!” she added ingenuously.
Egidia’s face had stiffened into the very haughtiest expression a proud face can assume. She was a woman who could curl her lip, and she did it now, but Mrs. Elles was too tactless and too much excited to notice.
“So you see that I am doing this entirely for his sake—quite against the grain, I assure you, but it seemed the only way—and I thought you would want to do anything to keep him out of it!”
“Keep him out of it!” exclaimed the other, pointing down towards the basement of her own house, as to the depths of an imaginary Divorce Court. “I should think I did! But how could you suppose that such an absurd lie as that could do him any good?”
“Couldn’t it? I thought it could. And I seem to be always being scolded for telling lies now!” sighed Mrs. Elles, “but I really thought I was splendide mendax this time! And though it was a lie, of course, you can make it true to save him, don’t you see?”
Egidia recovered herself. What was the use of being angry?