"If you have, it's your own fault. You'd no business to take poor dear Glengall when you were in love with someone else, though how you could look at others in the same day with Glengall fairly bothers me. And now, why don't you write and ask Anthony Trevithick to come back?"
"I don't want him to come back."
"Yes, you do; you're crying your eyes out for him every night. Yes, you are. And why you let all this muddle go on without doing anything to prevent it I don't know. I could shake you, Pam!"
"What would you have done, Sylvia?"
"Well, supposing I was in love with a man and knew him to be in love with me, and supposing he went away and didn't write, I'd never think anything except that the letter was lost. If I could get at him, I'd write and ask him what it meant. If I couldn't, I'd go on believing in him, maybe till I was old and grey, and till I died, as some have done—if I really loved him, mind you."
"Perhaps you are right, Sylvia."
"There's no doubt about it, Madam Faint-Heart."
"But come," she said, after a benevolent scrutiny of Pamela; "come, you look very nice, unless you'd like to put on the pink sun-bonnet. Anthony Trevithick is in the drawing-room."
"Sylvia!"
"Yes, I know I ought to have mentioned it before, instead of talking nonsense. The poor young man's on tenter-hooks."