Page:E Nesbit - The Literary Sense.djvu/243

Rh "It is my Master's business."

Had she read his words in a novel they would have seemed to her priggish, unnatural, and superlatively impertinent. Spoken by those thin, perfectly curved lips, they were at least interesting.

"That wasn't what you began about," she said, twisting the rings on her fingers. The catalogue of her gifts and graces was less a novelty to her than the reproaches to her virtue.

"No—am I to repeat what I began about? Ah—but I will. I began by saying what I came here to say: that you, as a married woman, have no right to turn men's heads and make them long for what can never be."

"But you don't know," she said. "My husband—"

"I don't wish to know," he interrupted. "Your husband is alive, and you are bound to be faithful to him, in thought, word, and deed. What I saw and heard in the little copse last night—"

"I do wish you wouldn't," she said. "You talk as if—"