"As he will!" Lady Rylton repeats her words, and, rising, comes towards her.  “Why don’t you answer?” says she.  “We want your answer.  Give it!”

“I have no answer,” says Mrs. Bethune slowly.  “Why should he not marry Miss Bolton?—­and again, why should he?  Marriage, as we have been told all our lives, is but a lottery—­they should have said a mockery,” with a little bitter smile.  “One could have understood that.”

“Then you advise Maurice to marry this girl?” asks Lady Rylton eagerly.

“Oh, no, no!  I advise nothing,” says Marian, with a little wave of her arms.

“But why?” demands Lady Rylton angrily.

She had depended upon Marian to support her against Margaret.

“Simply because I won’t,” says Mrs. Bethune, her strange eyes beginning to blaze.

“Because you daren’t?” questions Lady Rylton, with a sneer.

“I don’t understand you,” says Marian coldly.

“Don’t you?” Lady Rylton’s soft, little, fair face grows diabolical.  “Then let me explain.”  Margaret makes a movement towards her, but she waves her back.  “Pray let me explain, Margaret.  Our dear Marian is so intensely dull that she wants a word in season.  We all know why she objects to a marriage of any sort.  She made a fiasco of her own first marriage, and now hopes——­”

She would have continued her cruel speech but that Mrs. Bethune, who has risen, breaks into it.  She comes forward in a wild, tempestuous fashion, her eyes afire, her nostrils dilated!  Her beautiful red hair seems alight as she descends upon Lady Rylton.

“And that marriage!” says she, in a suffocating tone.  “Who made it? Who?" She looks like a fury.  There is hatred, an almost murderous hatred, in the glance she casts at the little, languid, pretty woman before her, who looks back at her with uplifted shoulders, and an all-round air of surprise and disapprobation. "You to taunt me!” says she, in a low, condensed tone. "You, who hurried, who forced me into a marriage with a man I detested!  You, who gave me to understand, when I resisted, that I had no place on this big earth except a pauper’s place—­a place in a workhouse!”

She stands tall, grave, magnificent, in her fury before Lady Rylton, who, in spite of the courage born of want of feeling, now shrinks from her as if affrighted.

“If you persist in going on like this,” says she, pressing her smelling-bottle to her nose, “I must ask you to go away—­to go at once.  I hate scenes.  You must go!”

“I went away once,” says Mrs. Bethune, standing pale and cold before her, “at your command—­I went to the home of the man you selected for me.  What devil’s life I led with him you may guess at. You knew him, I did not.  I was seventeen then.”  She pauses; the breath she draws seems to rive her body in twain.  “I came back——­” she says presently.

“A widow?”