"I do hope you'll win to-day, Mostyn," she murmured. "Asmodeus is a fine horse, and should make a fight for it. At any rate I wish you success, I do indeed."
There was something in the girl's expression, something beyond the softness and tenderness which he had already noticed, that made Mostyn scrutinise her face more carefully. There were black rims under her eyes, and he could have sworn that she had been crying and that quite recently.
He felt instinctively, too, that in this gentleness of demeanour, so unusual to the wayward girl, there was something of appeal, and of appeal directed to himself. It was as though she wanted him to understand more than she dared say.
He looked down pitifully into the girl's dark eyes. "Rada," he whispered, "you are not happy. I have been certain of it for a long time. Will you tell me what has happened? Oh"—he hesitated—"is it because——"
"Oh! I wish I could speak to you," she sighed. "I've wanted to ever so many times." She hung her head, evidently struggling with her pride. "Oh, you don't know," she cried at last, clasping her hands together, "what it has been like for me! There is no one that I can talk to—no one who can sympathise with me."
"Why not have come to me?" asked Mostyn reproachfully. "Are we not good friends?"
"Good friends, yes!" Her words were bitter. "But that it must be you to whom I have to come and admit that I have been a silly little fool—oh! the silliest little donkey ever born! Don't you understand how it hurts me—how it lowers me in my own eyes?"
"Never mind that," said Mostyn pitifully. "You poor little thing, don't you think that after all this time I have got to know you better, and that I can make allowance for your whims and all those wayward tricks of yours? Tell me the truth, Rada." He trembled as he spoke, for he felt that he had no right to put the question since Rada could not be for him. "You don't love Jack Treves; you don't want to marry him?"
Rada shook her head, and then fixed her eyes upon her race-card as though she were intensely interested in it. These two, who were talking of matters of such vital interest to them both, stood there in the midst of the pushing throng of the paddock. They spoke in lowered tones, and now and again, when anyone passed close to them or came to a halt by the railing where they stood, Mostyn would make some remark in a louder voice in order to make it appear that they were merely discussing the races.
"He has been a brute to me," she murmured, "a brute. Just now, driving to the course, he insulted me; he—he made me cry. Love him?" She stamped her little foot. "I hate him!" This time the words were genuine; they came from her heart.