The March Hare Murders by Elizabeth Ferrars Page A

don’t in the least want to?”
    “Who doesn’t want to?”
    “You know you don’t want to. You’ve told me so.”
    “But just a kiss, like old friends——”
    “We aren’t old friends,” Stella said, shifting her eyes from his to those in the portrait, “and we never shall be, after the silly muddle we’ve made.”
    “So that’s all it’s been to you, a silly muddle?”
    “Oh, don’t try to sentimentalise it now,” she said. “I didn’t come for that.”
    “Then precisely what did you come for?”
    Turning away, Stella sat down on the arm of the blue-covered chair, while Mark, picking up a pipe, began to fill it with slow, deliberate fingers. His manner was still gentle, but his expression, more than anything else, was uninterested.
    “Just why did you come, my dear?” he asked, as Stella did not continue. “I admit I was startled to find you here. You have been rather avoiding me of late.”
    “It isn’t I who have been doing the avoiding,” she said. “You made it quite plain you didn’t want to see much of me any more.”
    “That isn’t exactly true, is it?”
    “Isn’t it?”
    “I think you never did quite appreciate my point of view in the matter,” he said. “After all, you’re married, and you always made it plain to me that that was what counted most and that you loved your husband far more than you did me. Didn’t you ever think of what that must mean to me?”
    Stella caught her breath. “But that isn’t true. I didn’t …I never said …”
    “You didn’t say it, but that isn’t the only way of telling a person a thing, is it? And I’m not trying to blame you. I’m only reminding you that there are two sides to every question like this.”
    “But, Mark——”
    “I could stand just a certain amount of being the unimportant thing in your life, the thing in the background,” he said, “and then, I’m sure you’ll understand, it had to stop. I had to stop it, or heaven knows what would have happened to me.”
    Bewilderment kept Stella silent. She could make no sense of it. It seemed to her that nothing that Mark was saying bore any relationship to anything that had ever happened. But Mark’s face was soberly serious, and as he patted the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe, his manner appeared to be one of tense emotion, reduced to calm by powerful self-control.
    “But, Mark!”—she found her voice was shaking—“I said I loved you.”
    He nodded gravely. “Ah yes, I know—and I know you meant it too, in your way. But you understand that an old man like me, and a young woman …Well, perhaps I’m too easily hurt, perhaps I can’t face as much in the way of humiliation as I once could, or as one ought to be able to face when one’s in love. But the fact is, I’m too old to court suffering; I admit it. But don’t blame yourself, my dear—I don’t want you to do that. I’m very much too fond of you to be able to bear the thought that you’re in any way blaming yourself on my account.”
    Stella dug her fingers into the cushions of the chair.
    “You’re talking the most awful nonsense,” she said.
    “You know I’m not.”
    “But I told you, I’ve never really loved any one but you. …”
    He laughed softly. “My dear, you’re completely wrapped up in Ferdie. Any fool could see that.”
    “I’m fond of Ferdie—yes, but I don’t think I’ve ever been really in love with him.”
    “That’s only what you think.”
    “And what else is there—besides what one thinks?”
    He came over to her and put his arm for a moment round her shoulders. Then he picked up a box of matches. He chuckled.
    “I’ve always been so charmed by your intelligence,” he said. “But still, you do understand——”
    “I don’t understand anything,” Stella said, “except that you don’t want me, and this rigmarole is all something to do with that, but I can’t see why you should think it necessary. And I didn’t come over to talk about anything like