“Let’s see now.  You want to send word to Dr. Vivian this afternoon that he is to tell Colonel Dalhousie that you feel you did his son an injustice.  Is that it?”

Checked in her drift toward yielding, Carlisle said that was what she had thought.

“Well, let’s imagine what would happen then.  I said just now that for you to do this would accomplish nothing, but it would of course raise a cloud of doubt, of which the Colonel would probably make the very most.  He would not be so scrupulous about giving you the benefit of the doubt as you feel, at the moment, about giving it to his son.  He could make a most unpleasant story of it.”

Carlisle sat with lowered eyes, listening to the firm just tones.  Very lovely and desirable she looked in a “little” white dress which Hugo had praised once....

“And malice would seize on this story and make it worse and worse the further it travelled.  If you stop to think a moment, you will easily see what a sensation the scandalmongers can make out of the materials you ingenuously wish to offer them.”

He himself stopped to think; his keen mind flung out little exploring parties over the prospect he hinted at, and they raced back shrieking with vulgar horrors.  Surely, surely his chosen bride could never have contemplated this.

“Carlisle, have you reflected that you would be pointed at, whispered about, till the longest day you live?”

She sat motionless, with averted face, and felt that she was slipping from her last mooring.  Was it conceivable that Hugo was persuading her to hush it all up again—­just because it was easier?...  She and mamma had done that and thought nothing of it.  But, for this moment, at least, it seemed horribly different to have such a thought about Hugo....

She said in a little voice:  “But if it’s right, I oughtn’t to think about consequences, ought I?”

Canning groaned.

“How many times must I tell you that it’s not right, that it’s preposterous, that you yourself will say so to-morrow!...”

She made no reply, and then Canning, goaded on by his sense of strange impotence, spoke the depths of his secret resentment: 

“Really, I should have thought that the views of your future husband would have more weight with you than those of a casual medical missionary, known to be irresponsible and untrustworthy.”

Cally gave him a look full of young reproach, rose with nervous purposelessness, and went over to the empty hearthside.  Much nearer now peeped that startling shape.  She leaned upon the mantel and tried to think:  of her duty to Hugo, of how natural it was that he shouldn’t understand, of how all this had begun.  But unhappily the tone of his last remark seemed to have set other chords quivering within her, and all that she seemed able to think of was that it was cruelly unjust for him to misjudge her so.  He had promised to stand by her no matter what happened, and besides Dr. Vivian wasn’t irresponsible and untrustworthy.  The wild thought knocked that Hugo, now that he knew the truth about her, had ceased to love her....