“Marriage!” she laughed. “I, too, am a free agent, sir, and I have tasted liberty longer than you. I have no desire to relinquish it.”
A moment he stood gazing at her with clenched hands and open mouth, as if unable to grasp the extent of her folly and his own misery. Then he snapped his jaws together and crimsoned to the roots of his lightly powdered hair.
“It’s true, then?”
“What is true?”
“What all the world says; that you’re my Lord Harborough’s—my Lord Harborough’s——”
He choked upon the word.
Pamela Pounce held her breath in the dreadful silence that ensued. Then:
“Don’t be a foolish lad,” said Miss Falcon in a changed kind voice. “One day you’ll say, ‘Whatever the player woman may have done, she did one good deed to me. She wouldn’t marry me when I was fool enough to ask her.’”
Then Felicity turned back to the mirror with a laugh that rang like tinkling icicles, so musical it was, so cold.
The wretched young man cast himself on his knees, lifted his clasped hands and wrung them. He had forgotten that there was any witness, save the one who was, at that moment, all the world to him.