"Oh, you can't do that! I mean, please don't weep. You promised me once you wouldn't, you know."
He rose, frowning, the last hope dead, and she sat regarding him through drooped lashes.
"Good-by!" he muttered, and began backing toward the door.
She waited until his hand was on the knob. Then:
"Good-by, Gerald!" she said, smiling. "I'm so glad I had strength enough not to bolt with you when you asked me."
"Why?" he asked, desperately seizing an excuse to linger.
"Because you are so good-looking, and I do get so tired of looking at good-looking men."
When he got back to Dinghal's quarters young Andrews tried to cut his own throat, mainly to make Nina remember him. That he didn't succeed in the act was due primarily to a nervously irresolute hand, and secondarily to his friend Dinghal, who suspected and arrived in the nick of time.
In the excitement of the ensuing moment the young man told Dinghal every word of the conversation with Mrs. Darling; and the deputy commissioner, as he clumsily drew the edges of the shallow cut together and fastened them with court-plaster, waxed more and more indignant; for he was very fond of Gerald Andrews, and declared that if she didn't kill her husband it was not because she was not capable of it.
It seems probable that he did not confine the expression of this opinion, either, to the privacy of his own dwelling. For guests at a dinner-party which he attended that same evening quoted him to the same effect—exaggerated, possibly, in the retelling—and the report in time trickled into the hearing of Kneedrock.