"Oh, it isn't that, Hubert; it isn't that!" she exclaimed, in rather piteous accents; and she walked away to the window (this was the very room in which Vincent had first set eyes on Maisrie Bethune and her grandfather).
She stood there, alone, for a time. Then her husband went and joined her, and linked his arm within hers. She was crying a little.
"I did it for the best, Hubert," she sobbed.
"Did what for the best?"
"Getting that girl away. I never thought it would come to this."
"Now, now, Madge," said he, in a very affectionate fashion, "don't you worry about nothing—or rather, it isn't nothing, for Vin does look pretty seedy; but you mustn't assume that you are in any way responsible. People don't die nowadays of separation and a broken heart—not nowadays. He is fagged; he is not used to the late hours of the House of Commons; then there's that newspaper work——"
"But his manner, Hubert, his manner!" she exclaimed. "He seemed as if he no longer cared for anything in life; he hardly listened when I told him where we had been; he appeared to be thinking of something quite different—as if he were looking at ghosts."
"And perhaps he was looking at ghosts," said her husband. "For it was by that table there he first saw those two people who have made all this trouble. But why should you consider yourself responsible, Madge? It wasn't your money that sent them out of the country. It wasn't you who found out what they really were."
She passed her handkerchief across her eyes.
"I was quite sure," she went on—not heeding this consolation—"that as soon as she was got away—as soon as he was removed from the fascination of her actual presence—he would begin to see things in their true light. And then, thrown into the society of a charming and clever girl like Louie Drexel, I hoped everything for him. And is this all that has come of it, that he looks as if he were at death's door? It isn't the House of Commons, Hubert; and it isn't the newspaper-work: it is simply that he still believes in that girl, and that he is eating his heart out about her absence, and has no one to confide in. For that is the worst of it all: it is all a sealed book now, as between him and us. He was for leaving my house in Brighton—oh, the rage he was in with me about her!—and it would have been for the last time too, I know; only that I promised never again to mention the subject to him, and on that condition we have got on fairly well since. But how am I to keep silence any longer? I cannot see my boy like that. I must speak to him; I must ask him if he is still so mad as to believe in the honesty of those two people; and then, if I find that his infatuation still exists, even after all this time, then I must simply tell him that they took money to go away. How can he get over that? How can he get over that, Hubert?"