“Stop! She is as pure as the stars. Let there be no doubt about that. I tell you for her sake, not for yours.”
The Bishop drew a long breath and wiped his forehead. Joyce took his silence for incredulity.
“If I were a villain,” he continued, “do you think it would matter a brass button to me whether you knew it? I should say ‘yes,’ and you would walk away and I should never see you again.”
He thrust his hands in his pockets and faced his cousin. All the pariah’s bitter hatred arose within him against the man who stood there, the representative of the caste that had disowned and reviled him; conscious, too, as he was, of standing for the moment on a higher plane.
“I believe you. Oh—indeed—I believe you,” replied Everard, hurriedly. “But why is she here? Why has she sunk as low as this?”
“Your lordship should be the last to ask such a question.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“I should have thought it was obvious,” said Joyce, with a shrug of his shoulders.
The sarcasm sounded in the Bishop’s ears like cynicism.
“Do you mean that you have inveigled Madame Latour into supporting you?” he asked in a tone of disgust.