"My share, you mean? Oh, it's very simple." He paused, and added in a tone of laboured ease: "I'm going down to Fontainebleau to-morrow--"
She stared, not understanding. "To Fontainebleau--?"
Her bewilderment drew from him his first frank smile. "Well--I chose Fontainebleau--I don't know why... except that we've never been there together."
At that she suddenly understood, and the blood rushed to her forehead. She stood up without knowing what she was doing, her heart in her throat. "How grotesque--how utterly disgusting!"
He gave a slight shrug. "I didn't make the laws...."
"But isn't it too stupid and degrading that such things should be necessary when two people want to part--?" She broke off again, silenced by the echo of that fatal "want to part."...
He seemed to prefer not to dwell farther on the legal obligations involved.
"You haven't yet told me," he suggested, "how you happen to be living here."
"Here--with the Fulmer children?" She roused herself, trying to catch his easier note. "Oh, I've simply been governessing them for a few weeks, while Nat and Grace are in Sicily." She did not say: "It's because I've parted with Strefford." Somehow it helped her wounded pride a little to keep from him the secret of her precarious independence.
He looked his wonder. "All alone with that bewildered bonne? But how many of them are there? Five? Good Lord!" He contemplated the clock with unseeing eyes, and then turned them again on her face.
"I should have thought a lot of children would rather get on your nerves."
"Oh, not these children. They're so good to me."
"Ah, well, I suppose it won't be for long."
He sent his eyes again about the room, which his absent-minded gaze seemed to reduce to its dismal constituent elements, and added, with an obvious effort at small talk: "I hear the Fulmers are not hitting it off very well since his success. Is it true that he's going to marry Violet Melrose?"
The blood rose to Susy's face. "Oh, never, never! He and Grace are travelling together now."
"Oh, I didn't know. People say things...." He was visibly embarrassed with the subject, and sorry that he had broached it.
"Some of the things that people say are true. But Grace doesn't mind. She says she and Nat belong to each other. They can't help it, she thinks, after having been through such a lot together."