Mrs. Berrington buried her face in her hands. 'Merciful powers, to be insulted, to be covered with outrage, by one's wretched little sister!' she moaned.
'I think you should be thankful there is one human being--however wretched--who cares enough for you to care about the truth in what concerns you,' Laura said. 'Selina, Selina--are you hideously deceiving us?'
'Us?' Selina repeated, with a singular laugh. 'Whom do you mean by us?'
Laura Wing hesitated; she had asked herself whether it would be best she should let her sister know the dreadful scene she had had with Lionel; but she had not, in her mind, settled that point. However, it was settled now in an instant. 'I don't mean your friends--those of them that I have seen. I don't think _they_ care a straw--I have never seen such people. But last week Lionel spoke to me--he told me he _knew_ it, as a certainty.'
'Lionel spoke to you?' said Mrs. Berrington, holding up her head with a stare. 'And what is it that he knows?'
'That Captain Crispin was in Paris and that you were with him. He believes you went there to meet him.'
'Yes, and much more--I don't know why I should make a secret of it.'
'The disgusting beast!' Selina exclaimed slowly, solemnly. 'He enjoys the right--the legal right--to pour forth his vileness upon _me_; but when he is so lost to every feeling as to begin to talk to you in such a way----!' And Mrs. Berrington paused, in the extremity of her reprobation.
'Oh, it was not his talk that shocked me--it was his believing it,' the girl replied. 'That, I confess, made an impression on me.'
'Did it indeed? I'm infinitely obliged to you! You are a tender, loving little sister.'
'Yes, I am, if it's tender to have cried about you--all these days--till I'm blind and sick!' Laura replied. 'I hope you are prepared to meet him. His mind is quite made up to apply for a divorce.'
Laura's voice almost failed her as she said this--it was the first time that in talking with Selina she had uttered that horrible word. She had heard it however, often enough on the lips of others; it had been bandied lightly enough in her presence under those somewhat austere ceilings of Mellows, of which the admired decorations and mouldings, in the taste of the middle of the last century, all in delicate plaster and reminding her of Wedgewood pottery, consisted of slim festoons, urns and trophies and knotted ribbons, so many symbols of domestic affection and irrevocable union. Selina herself had flashed it at her with light superiority, as if it were some precious jewel kept in reserve, which she could convert at any moment into specie, so that it would constitute a happy provision for her future. The idea--associated with her own point of view--was apparently too familiar to Mrs. Berrington to be the cause of her changing colour; it struck her indeed, as presented by Laura, in a ludicrous light, for her pretty eyes expanded a moment and she smiled pityingly. 'Well, you are a poor dear innocent, after all. Lionel would be about as able to divorce me--even if I were the most abandoned of my sex--as he would be to write a leader in the _Times_.'