Ah, how hard things were! How they harassed, how they tortured, how they tore one asunder! She lay back and sobbed again, now not so passionately, but more gently, yet despairingly. So tragic a guise may sometimes be assumed by such homely truths as that you cannot blow both hot and cold, that you can't eat your cake and have it, and that you must in the end decide whether you will go out by the door or by the window.
She had told Ashley to come to her again that day to hear her decision. It was the appointed hour, and she began to listen for his tread with fear. For he would think that she did not love him, and she did love him; he would say that she wanted to go, and she loathed going; he would tell her all her going meant, and she knew all it meant. It would be between them as it had been yesterday, and worse. Alas, that she should have to fear the sound of Ashley's foot! Ah, that she could throw herself into his arms, saying, "Ashley, I won't go!" Then the sweet companionship and days in the country could come again, all could be forgotten in joy, and the existence of to-morrow be blotted out.
And Mr. Hazlewood and Babba would get somebody else to play the part—the great, great part.
There was the tread. She heard and knew it, and sat up to listen to it, her lips parted and her eyes wide; marked it till it reached the very door, but did not rise to meet it. She would sit there and listen to all that he said to her.
He came in smiling; that seemed strange; he walked up to her and greeted her cheerily; she glanced at him in frightened questioning.
"So you've arranged it?" he said, sitting down opposite to her.
"How do you know, Ashley?"
"Oh, I should know, anyhow," he answered, laughing; "but I met Babba singing a song in Piccadilly—rather loud it sounded—and he stopped to tell me."
"Oh," she murmured nervously. That he had come to know in this way seemed an anti-climax, a note which jarred the tragic harmony; she would have told him in a tempest of tears and self-reproach.
"You've done quite right," he went on. "It wasn't a chance to miss. I should have been a selfish brute if I'd wanted you to give it up. Besides—" He smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "Come, Ora," he went on, "don't look so sorrowful about it."