What would they have thought of you if I had?""Far worse of you than of me, however unjustly. You were the immediate cause of the tragedy; I only the remote one. Jansenius is not far-seeing when his feelings are touched. Few men are.""I don't understand you in the least. What tragedy do you mean?""Henrietta's death. I call it a tragedy conventionally.
Seriously, of course, it was commonplace enough."Agatha stopped and faced him. "What do you mean by what you said just now? You said that I was the immediate cause of the tragedy, and you say that you were talking of Henrietta's--of Henrietta. Ihad nothing to do with her illness."
Trefusis looked at her as if considering whether he would go any further. Then, watching her with the curiosity of a vivisector, he said: "Strange to say, Agatha," (she shrank proudly at the word), "Henrietta might have been alive now but for you. I am very glad she is not; so you need not reproach yourself on my account. She died of a journey she made to Lyvern in great excitement and distress, and in intensely cold weather. You caused her to make that journey by writing her a letter which made her jealous.""Do you mean to accuse me--"
"No; stop!" he said hastily, the vivisecting spirit in him exorcised by her shaking voice; "I accuse you of nothing. Why do you not speak honestly to me when you are at your ease? If you confess your real thoughts only under torture, who can resist the temptation to torture you? One must charge you with homicide to make you speak of anything but orchids."But Agatha had drawn the new inference from the old facts, and would not be talked out of repudiating it. "It was not my fault,"she said. "It was yours--altogether yours.""Altogether," he assented, relieved to find her indignant instead of remorseful.
She was not to be soothed by a verbal acquiescence. "Your behavior was most unmanly, and I told you so, and you could not deny it. You pretended that you--You pretended to have feelings--You tried to make me believe that Oh, I am a fool to talk to you; you know perfectly well what I mean.""Perfectly. I tried to make you believe that I was in love with you. How do you know I was not?"She disdained to answer; but as he waited calmly she said, "You had no right to be.""That does not prove that I was not. Come, Agatha, you pretended to like me when you did not care two straws about me. You confessed as much in that fatal letter, which I have somewhere at home. It has a great rent right across it, and the mark of her heel; she must have stamped on it in her rage, poor girl! So that I can show your own hand for the very deception you accused me--without proof--of having practiced on you.""You are clever, and can twist things. What pleasure does it give you to make me miserable?""Ha!" he exclaimed, in an abrupt, sardonic laugh. "I don't know;you bewitch me, I think."
Agatha made no reply, but walked on quickly to the end of the conservatory, where the others were waiting for them.
"Where have you been, and what have you been doing all this time?" said Jane, as Trefusis came up, hurrying after Agatha. "Idon't know what you call it, but I call it perfectly disgraceful!"Sir Charles reddened at his wife's bad taste, and Trefusis replied gravely: "We have been admiring the orchids, and talking about them. Miss Wylie takes an interest in them."
