“Don’t cry like that, little one,” he said gently. “Why should we say hard things to each other, you and I? We never used to.”
The gentle tone melted her at once. She dropped her hands. All the hardness had gone out of her face, and the sea-blue eyes were limpid and tender and winning.
“No, we used not. I have become very bad-tempered—very quarrelsome. But—oh, Colvin, I am so tired of life—of life here. It gets upon my nerves, I think. And I have hardly any friends, and you—you the greatest of them all, hardly seem to care for me—for us—now. I—we—never see you in these days, and—I feel it somehow.”
Colvin’s heart smote him. He need not have stayed away so long and so markedly, but there was a reason, and he had acted with the best intentions. Wherein he had blundered, as people invariably do when they suffer their actions to be guided by such tissue-paper motives, instead of by the hard and safe rule of judiciousness, expediency, and knowledge of human nature.
“Poor little girl! You must not run away with all those ideas,” he said. “And, you are flattering me. Well, I will come over again soon, and have a talk, but I must go now. There, will that do?”
He was talking to her quite gently, quite soothingly, just as he used to do, and the effect was wonderful. All the dejection, the sullenness, disappeared from her face, dispelled by a bright, almost happy smile.
“Good-bye, then,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll come and see you start this time. Good-bye, dear.”
Her eyes shone soft and dewy in the upturned face. Her lips were raised invitingly. It was not in mortal man to refuse them, however stern rectitude under the circumstances might dictate such a course. This one did not refuse them.
“Good-bye, my darling!” she breathed into his ear, in a voice so barely audible as to be almost inarticulate. And as he left her and went out to find his horse and see about saddling up, it was with a vague misgiving that the loose coil, to which he had made allusion in his own mind, had, within the last few moments, very perceptibly tightened.
We made use just above of the expression “under the circumstances.” The “circumstances” were, that by that time this cautious, and cynical and experienced man of the world was deeply, devotedly, and entirely in love with Aletta De la Rey.