CHAPTER LVII. THE PITY OF IT ALL.
Although it was nearly two weeks since Sinclair had written to her, she had not seen him once. He had talked the matter over with Tom and Mrs. Davis, and they had decided that, for a time at least, it would be best for her not to see him. About a week before the Ballards sailed, Cleo wrote to Sinclair. She made no allusion whatever to his letter to her. She simply asked him to come and see her before she left Japan, and without a moment's hesitation Sinclair went straight to her. He could afford to be generous now that his own happiness was assured.
It was a strange meeting. The man was at first constrained and ill at ease. On the other hand, the girl met him in a perfectly emotionless, calm fashion. She gave him her hand steadily, and her voice did not falter in the slightest.
"I want you to know the truth," she said, "before I go away."
"Don't let us talk about it, Cleo," Sinclair said. "It will only cause you pain."
"That is what I deserve," she said. "That is why I have always been wrong—I was afraid to look anything painful in the face. I avoided and shrank from it till—till it broke my heart. It does me good now to talk—to speak of it all."
He sat down beside Cleo, and looked at her with eyes of compassion.
"You must not pity me," she said, a trifle unsteadily. "I do not deserve it. I have been a very wicked woman."
"It was not altogether your fault, Cleo," he said, vaguely trying to comfort, but she contradicted him almost fiercely.
"It was—it was, indeed, all my fault." She caught her breath sharply. "However, that was not what I wanted to speak about. It was this. I wanted to tell you that—that—after all, I do not love you. That I—I loved him—Orito!" She half-breathed the last word.
Sinclair sat back in his chair, and looked at her with slow, studying eyes.
She repeated wearily: "Yes; I loved him—but I—did not—know—it till it was too late!"
For a long time after that the two sat in complete silence. Sinclair could not find words to speak to her, and the girl had exhausted her heart in that heart-breaking and now tragic confession.
Then the man broke the silence with a sharp, almost impatient, ejaculation, which escaped him unconsciously. "The pity of it all!—Good God!"
"Arthur, I want to see—to speak to Numè before I go away. You will let me; will you not?"
He hesitated only a moment, and then: "Yes, dear, anything you want."
And when he was leaving her, she said to him, abruptly, with a sharp questioning note in her voice that wanted to be denied:
"I am a very wicked woman!"
"No—no; anything but that," he said, and stooping kissed her thin, frail hand.
Something choked him at the heart and blinded his eyes as he left her, and all the way back to his office, in the jinrikisha, he kept thinking of the girl's white, suffering face, and memories of the gay, happy, careless Cleo he had known in America mingled with it in his thoughts in a frightful medley. Something like remorse crept into his own heart; for was he entirely blameless? But he forgot everything painful when he arrived home, for there was a perfume-scented little note written on thin rice-paper, waiting for him, and Numè was expecting him that day. When one has present happiness, it is not hard to forget the sorrows of others.