III
On the last day of the six months Murchison presented himself before Gina, and without embarrassment, and also without fervor, requested to know his fate. He was greatly displeased with Gina’s conduct on this occasion. She wished to be indefinite;[Pg 75] she wished neither to take him nor to leave him, but to keep him in reserve.
“You know how fond I am of you, Robert,” she said.
“No,” he replied, “I don’t. My question was just, as you might say, to determine that point.”
“Sometimes I think that, on account of the children, I shouldn’t marry again,” she said tentatively.
“That’s for you to say. You ought to know,” he remarked.
“I suppose at my age, I ought!”
He bowed stiffly. There came to Gina the recollection of what Dr. Walters had said. He had assured her that she was like a young girl.
“You’ve never grown up,” he had told her. “You never will.”
“I’m afraid, Robert,” she said, “that I never could make you happy.”
He turned away, and was silent for some time.
“That’s for you to say,” he repeated. “You ought to know your own mind.”
His chief purpose was to avoid showing how horribly wounded and bereft he was. So valiantly did he conceal his hurt that Gina herself was offended and angered by his high spirits.
“I believe he’s glad!” she thought. “He’s delighted to get out of it!”
She forgot entirely how she had lain awake at night, planning some way to tell Robert that she couldn’t marry him. On that night she lay awake marveling at his treachery. She had decided that he didn’t really care.
On the evening of his next visit she had Dr. Walters there. She had the doctor’s superior devotion on exhibition, and encouraged him to be incredibly gallant and tender. He did his part admirably, but Murchison failed her. He was pleasant, unusually pleasant and talkative, and he gave no more sign of being a disappointed suitor than if he were her grandfather. He made a most favorable impression upon Dr. Walters.
Before he left, he did something which enraged Gina.
“Will you not sing ‘Old Dog Tray’?” he asked blandly. “It is a great favorite with me.”
She refused, but Dr. Walters joined his entreaties to Murchison’s, and she had to yield. So she sang the simple old ballad with burning cheeks; and while she sang it, there sat Robert, smoking his pipe in wooden silence.