Part 67

I went on awkwardly. “I've got to tell you--something extraordinarily distressing,” I said.

She was manifestly altogether unaware.

“There seems to be a good deal of scandal abroad--I've only recently heard of it--about myself--and Isabel.”

“Isabel!”

I nodded.

“What do they say?” she asked.

It was difficult, I found, to speak.

“They say she's my mistress.”

“Oh! How abominable!”

She spoke with the most natural indignation. Our eyes met.

“We've been great friends,” I said.

“Yes. And to make THAT of it. My poor dear! But how can they?” She paused and looked at me. “It's so incredible. How can any one believe it? I couldn't.”

She stopped, with her distressed eyes regarding me. Her expression changed to dread. There was a tense stillness for a second, perhaps.

I turned my face towards the desk, and took up and dropped a handful of paper fasteners.

“Margaret,” I said, “I'm afraid you'll have to believe it.”

Margaret sat very still. When I looked at her again, her face was very white, and her distressed eyes scrutinised me. Her lips quivered as she spoke. “You really mean--THAT?” she said.

I nodded.

“I never dreamt.”

“I never meant you to dream.”

“And that is why--we've been apart?”

I thought. “I suppose it is.”

“Why have you told me now?”

“Those rumours. I didn't want any one else to tell you.”

“Or else it wouldn't have mattered?”

“No.”

She turned her eyes from me to the fire. Then for a moment she looked about the room she had made for me, and then quite silently, with a childish quivering of her lips, with a sort of dismayed distress upon her face, she was weeping. She sat weeping in her dress of cloth of gold, with her bare slender arms dropped limp over the arms of her chair, and her eyes averted from me, making no effort to stay or staunch her tears. “I am sorry, Margaret,” I said. “I was in love.... I did not understand....”

Presently she asked: “What are you going to do?”

“You see, Margaret, now it's come to be your affair--I want to know what you--what you want.”