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192 anger had left her, seemed to come to Edgar in fiery stabs. For the moment he could scarcely believe that Lucia had said these things, so astounding and shocking were they. He got up and began his quarter-decking again, and this time Lucia did not appear to notice. There was drama in the air that demanded her whole attention.

"I am afraid we cannot dismiss the matter, as you suggest," he said. "Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but what I gather you mean is that the character and morals of your friends is a matter of indifference to you. Do you mean that?"

He looked at her with a face gone suddenly pale and haggard. A few minutes ago only he had with all sincerity called Lucia a child, a thing unspotted, but was it a child who had said this?

He came a step nearer and paused, clenching his hands together.

"Quick," he said, "what do you mean? You have said that the whole moral code—that is what it comes to—is a matter of indifference to you."

Lucia saw now where they stood. The whole thing was ghastly in its simplicity. Her words had been perfectly sincere, perfectly natural, and they had come to her husband in the light of some horrible revelation, a thing that she saw at once might easily and swiftly spoil their lives if it was allowed lodgment in his mind. She had to dispose of it somehow; she had, with all the force of her quick and ingenious brain, to twist her words from the sense in which she had meant them and the sense in which he had understood them, and give them some fresh turn of meaning. She stood up also.

"Really, it seems to me that I am very good-natured to discuss things with you at all," she said, "for either, my dear Edgar, you wilfully distort my meaning, which I should be sorry to suppose was the case, or else either you or I must be very stupid—I in having stated things very badly, or you in not being able to understand what appears to me to be a very simple affair."

She paused a moment, but only for a moment, and it was really rather a difficult task that lay before her, but there was clearly no time to think things over.

"You seem to think," she said, "that I have nothing better to do than listen to you making vile insinuations about my friends and saying dreadful things about me. Yes, I must go back to that; for though I said I would dismiss it, you refused to do so. It seems that it is not enough for you to repeat the gossip of the