"Better go, Phillis," said Lawrence.
At the prospect of battle the real nature of the man asserted itself. He drew himself erect, and met her wild eyes with a steady gaze, which had neither terror nor surprise in it—a gaze such as a mad doctor might practise upon his patients, a look which calms the wildest outbreaks, because it sees in them nothing but what it expected to find, and is only sorry.
"No! she shall not go," said Victoria, sweeping her skirts behind her with a splendid movement from her feet; "she shall not go until she has heard me first. You dare to make love to this girl, this schoolgirl, before my very eyes. She shall know, she shall know our secret!"
"Victoria," said Lawrence calmly, "you do not understand what you are saying. Our secret? Say your secret, and be careful."
The door moved an inch or two; the man standing behind it was shaking in every limb. "Their secret? her secret?" He was going to learn at last; he was going to find the truth; he was going—— And here a sudden thought struck him that he had neglected his affairs of late, and that, this business once got through, he must look into things again; a thought without words, because, somehow, just then he had no words—he had forgotten them all.
The writer of the anonymous letters had done much mischief, as she hoped to do. People who write anonymous letters generally contrive so much. Unhappily, the beginning of mischief is like the boring of a hole in a dam or dyke, because very soon, instead of a trickling rivulet of water, you get a gigantic inundation. Nothing is easier than to have your revenge; only it is so very difficult to calculate the after consequences of revenge. If the writer of the letters had known what was going to happen in consequence, most likely they would never have been written.
"Their secret? her secret?" He listened with all his might. But Victoria, his wife Victoria, spoke out clearly; he could hear without straining his ears.
"Be careful," repeated Lawrence.
"I shall not be careful; the time is past for care. You have sneered and scoffed at me; you have insulted me; you have refused almost to know me,—all that I have borne, but this I will not bear."
"Phillis Fleming." She turned to the girl. Phillis did not shrink or cower before her; on the contrary, she stood like Lawrence, calm and quiet, to face the storm, whatever storm might be brewing. "This man takes you in his arms and kisses you. He says he loves you; he dares to tell you he loves you. No doubt you are flattered. You have had the men round you all day long, and now you have the best of them at your feet, alone, when they are gone. Well, the man you want to catch, the excellent parti you and Agatha would like to trap, the man who stands there——"