“You were right, Fernando,” said Muriel, coldly. “I never would, and Harrington knows it.”
“So I thought,” complacently replied Witherlee, thinking, oddly enough, that she concurred with him. “I knew that you and Harrington were only friends.”
“But this Bagasse, I am told, thought it would not be beneath me to marry Harrington,” remarked Muriel, with an air of contemptuous hauteur which Witherlee had never seen her wear before, and which surprised him. Whew! he thought, Harrington is catching it now for his presumption with a vengeance! I wouldn’t sit there, and have that said to my face, for anything.
“Why yes,” he replied, glancing at Harrington, who sat with his face buried in his hand, and what was visible of it so red that Witherlee thought he was smitten with agonizing shame, as he was, but it was for Witherlee. “Yes, Bagasse went into a fit of eloquence about it, and told what he would do if he was ‘vair fine ladee,’ and thought Harrington loved him.” And Witherlee laughed turtle-husky at the reminiscence, without any more regard for Harrington’s feelings than if he were a post.
“Well, Wentworth, are you satisfied?” asked Muriel, quietly.
Wentworth, who had gone off into deep abstraction, and lost the conversation between Muriel and Witherlee (which would have convulsed him, and which had sorely tried Emily’s power to suppress her mirth), started and colored.
“Why, yes,” he replied, “I am bound to own that Fernando’s explanation puts a different look upon the matter, though I think he did wrong to speak to Bagasse in such terms of Harrington, and I think he owes Harrington an apology for language at the best too ungentlemanly—I must say it, Fernando—to be passed over in silence. There is no excuse for it. It was shameful.”
“Do you really think so, Richard?” said Muriel, with such a contemptuous tone and expression that Wentworth turned red, and stared at her, wondering what she could mean; while Emily moved away to the window, and hid herself behind a curtain, that she might give some vent to her agony of mirth.
“Well, Fernando,” said Muriel, after a pause, “what do you think about making Mr. Harrington an apology?”