When the music ceased for an interval, Mr. Dalrymple rested his arm on the back of the chair which had served Rachel for a footstool, and looking into her face, said under his breath,
"Gordon gave me your message—I came down to thank you—and I thought we should get on better if we could see each other just once. Dear, we must try and comfort ourselves with knowing that neither of us played the other false."
"I did—I did," she whispered hurriedly. "I ought to have trusted you, Roden."
"Yes—that was a mistake. But you did not know any better, poor child. And they were too many for you, those people. Gordon ought to have insisted on seeing you, himself, or getting some message to you, and not have left you in their hands. But he did his best, he says. He was too anxious to get back to me to have much patience over it, and he didn't bargain for being told lies of that magnitude in cold blood. However,—however——"
He broke off and looked at her with a passion of love and grief in his eyes that he dared not trust to speech. And she looked back at him, with her simple soul laid bare—longing to make him know, if they were never to be together like this again, how absolutely in her heart she had been true to him. She would not tell him a lie, at any rate.
"Oh," he said in a sort of groaning whisper, drawing a long hard breath, "oh, my little one, isn't it hard lines!"
"Don't," she gasped, feeling that clutch on her throat tighten with a sudden spasm; "oh, Roden, don't!"
And he straightened himself quickly, and sat back in his chair. And the organ began to play again—a stately march of Schubert's, which acted like a tonic on her disordered nerves, and as a sedative to the hysterical excitement that for a moment had threatened to overmaster her.
The echoes of that march rang in her ears, when Roden was gone back to Queensland and this chapter of her life was finished, for many a long day.
And then at last the thunders of the National Anthem brought the performance to a close, and the audience trooped out, casting curious glances as they went at the distinguished-looking couple standing conspicuously apart—the tall stranger with the peculiar moustache, who had soldier and gentleman written on him from head to foot, and the graceful young lady with the lovely complexion and the irreproachable French dress, whom nobody "who was anybody" failed to recognise.