"I didn't want to break off the engagement," she said at last, unable to keep her thoughts much longer to herself.
"You didn't want to!" said May gently. It was scarcely a question, but it drew Gwendolen to an explanation of her words.
"No one could make you," said May, quietly. "Could they?"
"She did," said Gwen, with a burst of tears. "I wanted to make it all right, and she wouldn't let me. If only I could have seen the Warden, he would have taken my side, perhaps," and here Gwen's voice became less emphatic. "But Mrs. Potten simply made me. She was determined. She hates me. I can't bear her."
"Had you done absolutely nothing to make her so determined?" asked May wondering.
"Nothing--except a little joke----" began Gwen. "It was merely a sort of a joke."
"A joke!" said May, and her voice was very low and strange.
The umbrella standing in the corner of the room in the shadow seemed to make faces at Gwen. Why hadn't she put the horrid thing in the wardrobe?
"It was only meant as a sort of joke," she repeated, and then the overwhelming flood of bitter memory coming upon her, she yielded to her instinct and poured out to May, bit by bit, a broken garbled history of the whole affair--a story such as Belinda and Co. would tell--a story made, unconsciously, all the more sordid and pitiful because it was obviously not the whole truth.
And this was a story told by one who might have been the Warden's wife! May went on soothing the girl's hair and brow with her hand.
"And Mrs. Potten wouldn't let me make it all right. She refused to let me, though I begged her to, and gave her my word of honour," wept Gwen, indignantly. Then she suddenly said, "Oh, the fire's going out and perhaps you're cold!" for she was fearful lest her visitor would leave her. "When my dinner was taken away too much coal was put on my fire, and I was too miserable to make a fuss."
"I'm not cold," said May. "But I will stir up the fire." She rose from her chair and went to the fire, and poked it up into a blaze.
"I'm afraid, Gwen, that you couldn't make it all right with Mrs. Potten, except by----"
"By what?" asked Gwen, becoming suddenly excited. "If only Dr. Middleton had not been away, I might have borrowed from him. Do you mean that?"