“And do you propose to go on seeing this person when he recovers?” asked Mrs. Hardacre.
“I really can't argue with you,” said her mother, mystified. “If you had told me this rubbish yesterday, I should have thought you touched in your wits. To-day it is midsummer madness.”
“The man has shown himself to be such a horrible beast. Of course, if you think confessing to having seduced a girl under infamous circumstances and driven her by his brutality to child-murder and suicide, and blazoning the whole thing out at a fashionable garden-party and getting himself shot for his pains, are idyllic virtues, nothing more can be said. It's a case, as I remarked, for a madhouse.” Norma came and stood before her mother, her brows knitted in perplexity.
“Perhaps I am going crazy--I really don't understand what you are talking about.”
Mrs. Hardacre leant forward in her chair and drew a long breath. A gleam of intelligence came into her eyes as she looked at Norma.
“Do you mean to say you don't know what the row was about before the man fired the shot?”
Her mother fell back in her chair and laughed. It was the first moment of enjoyment she had experienced since Stone's black figure had appeared on the terrace. Reaction from strain caused the laughter to ring somewhat sharply. Norma regarded her with an anxious frown.
“My dear child--it's too funny. I thought you would have been too clever to be taken in by a man like this. I see, you've been imagining him a Galahad--a sort of spotless prophet--though what use you can have for such persons I can't make out. Well, this is what happened.” Embellishing the story here and there with little spiteful adornments, she described with fair accuracy, however, the scene that had occurred. Norma listened stonily.
“This is true?” she asked when her mother had finished.
“Ask any one who was there--your father--Morland.”
“I can't believe it. He is not that sort of man.”
“Is n't he? I knew he was the first time I set eyes on him. Perhaps another time you'll allow me to have some sense--of course, if it is immaterial to you whether a man is a brute--What are you ringing the bell for?”
“I am going to ask Morland to come up here.”
The maid appeared, received Norma's message, and retired. Norma sat by her little writing-table, with her head turned away from her mother, and there was silence between them till the maid returned.