Judith might well have thought herself betrayed by the disclosure which Esther had made in her irritated curiosity, in her resentful desire to confront the smiling young man with the pathetic picture of a girl in tears. When a woman says to a man, of another woman, "See how fond she is of you!" there is generally implied the reproach, "And you under-rate, you slight, you don't return, her affection." Such a reproach had certainly underlain the contrast Esther drew between Judith's tears and the smiles in which Arthur had presumably indulged during his talk with Ayesha Layard. But Arthur took the contrast lightly; it did not really come home to him; he did not seek to explore its possible meaning, the suggestion contained in it. Lightly too he seemed to have taken Bernadette's telegram--her recollection of him at a crisis of his fortunes, coming out of the silence and darkness in which her flight had wrapped her. Here was a thing which might surely have moved him to emotion, rousing poignant memories? But when Miss Ayesha Layard rather made fun of it, he had not minded! Even this account of what had happened--this faint adumbration of the truth--agreed ill with Esther's previous conception of him.

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