So she hung on his arm, and listened with parted lips to his raptures, to the fantastic string of plans, the sweet, repeated endearments which poured from his lips. Now that they had met there were to be no more partings. Things were changed. He had plenty of money. Here she looked at him in astonishment, and he drew a handful of gold from his pocket. He was in the Devil’s own vein of luck, he told her. He wouldn’t listen to her objurgation; he laughed at the admonishing finger. Her assurance that she possessed a safer and more worthy source of wealth he tossed aside as a jest. There was a horse of his booked for Ascot. If she did not romp in with a sweet little cottage at Fulham for them both at her heels!...
“Oh, Mr. Bellairs!” Pamela clasped her other hand over his arm. “I could come up and down to business as easy as easy. A cottage with a bit of garden! ’Tis the very thing I’ve always dreamed of!”
“And I hope you put me in the dream, my lovely girl.” He kissed her behind the trunk of a big beech-tree. “Why,” cried he, “who’d have thought to find you so sensible all at once?”
It was not, perhaps, so much the words, as the way in which he looked at her after he had kissed her, that opened the sudden gulf before her! She drew back, and stood staring; her face haggard; all the lovely bloom and youthful ecstasy blasted out of it.
Then she said, in a low, strained voice—Pamela went straight to her point, she was not one to cover ugly situations with a mince of words—“You don’t mean marriage, then, Mr. Bellairs?”
The ugliness of his mood sprang into naked prominence. He broke into a loud laugh.
“Come, don’t play the prude, now! Don’t pretend you didn’t understand.” Then he added, a sort of shame creeping into his accents in spite of himself, “Be sensible, my dear girl. Don’t play the fool with our lives again.”
He put out his arm again to embrace her, but she struck him a vigorous buffet that sent him staggering from her.
“You’ve laid a vile trap for me, Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, but thank God I didn’t fall into it! I see you now as you are, a low, selfish scamp that doesn’t think it shame to take his pleasure on other people. You’d drag my good name into the dust with as little concern as you live on my Lady’s money. So long as you get your fling you don’t care who you rob or what you destroy! Oh, I’m glad to have seen you as you are! And good morning to you, Mr. Jocelyn Bellairs, for a very paltry dog!”
She swept him a curtsy which was magnificent in its repudiation. He had a swift vision of her scorching eyes, her scarlet cheeks; she turned and left him, dumbfounded.