Witherlee, emboldened to intense insolence by his monstrously silly supposition that Muriel was showering contempt on her lover, curved a supercilious lip and curled a contumelious nose to that extent, that the fiery Wentworth positively ached to knock him down.
“I do not think about it at all,” drawled the good Fernando.
“Very well,” said Muriel, holding Wentworth with her eye. “Now, Fernando, since we are explaining things, let me ask you how you came to say that you saw Wentworth and I one afternoon more than a week ago, folded in each other’s arms in the parlor, and kissing each other?”
Muriel’s tactics were capital. By diverting his mind from the main subject of conversation, she had thrown him completely off his guard, and then suddenly sprung this question upon him. Fernando positively changed color, and then turned deadly pale. If a bomb-shell had quietly fallen into his lap, with the fuze just fizzing into the powder, he could not have been much more astounded.
There was a pause, in which Emily came gliding back to her seat, all alive with curiosity at this unexpected turn in affairs, while Wentworth stared blankly, and Harrington sat with his face buried in his hand, watching Witherlee, as the marine phrase has it, out of the tail of his eye.
“Well, Fernando, you turn red, and then you turn pale,” remarked Muriel, quietly. “What do those two colors mean?”
“They mean astonishment,” said Witherlee, recovering his self-possession instantly, and looking at her with his most brazen face, conscious that the tug of war had come, and with an antagonist of another sort than Wentworth or Emily.
Oho, thought Muriel, surveying his admirably dissimulated face. I wonder if I’m going to lose this move. Let’s see.
“You don’t mean to deny that I did see you in such a position with Wentworth?” said Witherlee.