His lips were tight
closed, his eyes merciless. So he had looked that day at Apsley when
he had returned to find his sister with her in the dining-room. So
he had directed his gaze upon the woman whom she had heard him
cross-examine in the Law Courts. The suspicion leapt to her mind that
he knew, that he had seen her; but having steeled herself to tell
the lie, she did not attempt, in the sudden moment, to reconstruct
her mind to a hasty admission of the truth. She must tell the lie,
clinging to it through everything.
"Have you only just come in?" he asked.
The tone in his voice seemed to question her right to come in at all.
And she was no actress. Another woman in her place, even knowing all
she knew, suspecting all she did, would have turned to him in
amazement; questioning his right to speak to her like that; covered
her guilt with a cloak of astonished innocence and paraded her injury
before him. Sally took it for granted; did not even argue from it
the certainty that he had seen her. Her mind was made up for the lie
and she did not possess that agility of purpose which, at a moment's
notice, could enable her to twist her intentions--a mental
somersault that needs the double-jointedness of cunning and all the
consummate flexibility of tact.
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