“Have you drunk any of it?” she demanded.

“No,” Emily answered.  “I have not.”

Hester Osborn dropped into a chair and leaned forward, covering her face with her hands.  She looked like a woman on the verge of an outbreak of hysteria, only to be held in check by a frenzied effort.

Lady Walderhurst, quite slowly, turned the colour of the milk itself.  But she did nothing but sit still and gaze at Hester.

“Wait a minute.”  The girl was trying to recover her breath.  “Wait till I can hold myself still.  I am going to tell you now.  I am going to tell you.”

“Yes,” Emily answered faintly.

It seemed to her that she waited twenty minutes before another word was spoken, that she sat quite that long looking at the thin hands which seemed to clutch the hidden face.  This was a mistake arising from the intensity of the strain upon her nerves.  It was scarcely five minutes before Mrs. Osborn lowered her hands and laid them, pressed tightly palm to palm, between her knees.

She spoke in a low voice, such a voice as a listener outside could not have heard.

“Do you know,” she demanded, “what you represent to us—­to me and to my husband—­as you sit there?”

Emily shook her head.  The movement of disclaimer was easier than speech.  She felt a sort of exhaustion.

“I don’t believe you do,” said Hester.  “You don’t seem to realise anything.  Perhaps it’s because you are so innocent, perhaps it’s because you are so foolish.  You represent the thing that we have the right to hate most on earth.”

“Do you hate me?” asked Emily, trying to adjust herself mentally to the mad extraordinariness of the situation, and at the same time scarcely understanding why she asked her question.

“Sometimes I do.  When I do not I wonder at myself.”  The girl paused a second, looked down, as if questioningly, at the carpet, and then, lifting her eyes again, went on in a dragging, half bewildered voice:  “When I do not, I actually believe it is because we are both—­women together.  Before, it was different.”

The look which Walderhurst had compared to “that of some nice animal in the Zoo” came into Emily’s eyes as two honest drops fell from them.

“Would you hurt me?” she faltered.  “Could you let other people hurt me?”

Hester leaned further forward in her chair, widening upon her such hysterically insistent, terrible young eyes as made her shudder.

“Don’t you see?” she cried. “Can’t you see?  But for you my son would be what Walderhurst is—­my son, not yours.”

“I understand,” said Emily.  “I understand.”

“Listen!” Mrs. Osborn went on through her teeth.  “Even for that, there are things I haven’t the nerve to stand.  I have thought I could stand them.  But I can’t.  It does not matter why.  I am going to tell you the truth.  You represent too much.  You have been too great a temptation.  Nobody meant anything or planned anything at first.  It all came by degrees.  To see you smiling and enjoying everything and adoring that stilted prig of a Walderhurst put ideas into people’s heads, and they grew because every chance fed them.  If Walderhurst would come home—­”