'Some one you don't know?' she repeated, with a question.
'Yes.' 'I wonder!' She laughed again. 'It must be that,' she said presently.
'It cannot be anything else.' 'What?' 'It must be "Cordova." Don't you think so? I know just what you mean--I
feel it, I hear it in my voice when I speak, I see it in the glass when
I look at myself. But not always. It comes and it goes, it has its
hours. Sometimes I'm it when I wake up suddenly in the night, and
sometimes I'm Margaret Donne, whom you used to like. And I'm sure of
something else. Shall I tell you? One of these days Margaret Donne will
go away and never come back, and there will be only Cordova left, and
then I suppose I shall go to the bad. They all do, you know.' Lushington did know, and made an odd movement and bent himself, as if
something sharp had run into him unawares, and he turned his face away,
to hide the look of pain which he could not control. Margaret had
hardly spoken the cruel words when she realised what she had done.
'Oh, I'm so sorry!' she cried, in dreadful distress, and the voice came
from her heart and was quite her own again.
In her genuine pain for him, she took his hand in both her own, and
drew it to her and looked into his eyes.
'It's all right,' he answered. 'You did not mean it. Don't distress
yourself.' There were tears in her eyes now, but they were not going to overflow.
She dropped his hands.
'How splendidly good and generous you are!' Margaret cried. 'There's
nobody like you, after all!' Lushington forgot his pain in the pleasure he felt at this outburst.
'But why?' he asked, not very clear as to her reasons for praising him.
'It was the same thing the other day,' she said, 'when we upset you on
the Versailles road. You were in a bad way; I don't think I remember
ever seeing a man in a worse plight! I couldn't help laughing a
little.' 'No,' said Lushington, 'I suppose you couldn't.' 'You had your revenge afterwards, though you did not know it,' Margaret
answered.
'What sort of revenge?' 'Monsieur Logotheti was detestable. It would have given me the greatest
satisfaction to have stuck hat-pins into him, ever so many of them, as
thick as the quills on a porcupine!' Lushington laughed, in a colourless way.
'As you say, I was revenged,' he answered.