"Please don't take any trouble on my account; just leave me alone with my torturing forebodings. No one but God can help me now. The sight of me is painful to you, and I shrink from annoying you. Mr. Herriott, please leave me to myself."
He sat down beside her, the cup in his hand.
"To-night you have made me suffer more than you will ever understand—you have hurt me beyond all possibility of healing—and, perhaps, in the terribly sudden overthrow of beautiful hopes you had called into existence, I may have seemed harsh. If so, you must pardon any desperate words my torture wrung from me. Poor child, you have sorrows enough without any additions from my hand. I cannot trust myself to talk to you; my temper is sometimes beyond control, and you have bruised my heart so sorely I am not sure of self-command. Poor little girl! Do me the favor to drink this, because I ask it."
He held the cup to her lips and she drank. He took a pillow from the opposite seat and put it behind her head.
"If you need anything you have only to open the door and I shall come."
"Mr. Herriott, there is but one thing I shall ever ask you to do for me. The ring you placed on my finger I took off at your request. Here it is. With your own hand put it back where it belongs, and it will be there when I die."
She held out her hand with the ring in her palm. He looked at her intently, and his lips tightened.
"Repeat a mockery? A shameful farce!"
He lifted the glittering circle, tossed it up twice, struggling with the impulse to hurl it through the window, then suddenly slipped it on her finger, dropped her hand, and, picking up his satchel, left her.
Would the night never end? If Duncan Keith refused to sell? She thought of quiet, lovely olive-clad plains in Sicily, with pergolas cool in green shadows of vines, where they might retreat from disgraceful publicity. Mr. Herriott scorned, repudiated her, and henceforth she could devote herself entirely to tender care of her father. Ambition and hope were dead, but was there any anæsthetic to still the burning stings of memory? She went to the opposite seat and rested her head against the open window. A thin, sallow, fading old moon hung like a spectre in the sky where the morning star lighted the way for the coming new day, and the dew-sprinkled air swept in, spiced with waves of aroma from a blooming vineyard.